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Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniques

Alsubaihin, A; Sarro, F; Black, S; Capra, L; (2019) Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniques. Empirical Software Engineering 10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Context: Code-free software similarity detection techniques have been used to support different software engineering tasks, including clustering mobile applications (apps). The way of measuring similarity may affect both the efficiency and quality of clustering solutions. However, there has been no previous comparative study of feature extraction methods used to guide mobile app clustering. Objective: In this paper, we investigate different techniques to compute the similarity of apps based on their textual descriptions and evaluate their effectiveness using hierarchical agglomerative clustering. Method: To this end we carry out an empirical study comparing five different techniques, based on topic modelling and keyword feature extraction, to cluster 12,664 apps randomly sampled from the Google Play App Store. The comparison is based on three main criteria: silhouette width measure, human judgement and execution time. Results: The results of our study show that using topic modelling, in addition to collocation-based and dependency-based feature extractors perform similarly in detecting app-feature similarity. However, dependency-based feature extraction performs better than any other in finding application domain similarity (ρ = 0.7,p − value < 0.01). Conclusions: Current categorisation in the app store studied does not exhibit a good classification quality in terms of the claimed feature space. However, a better quality can be achieved using a good feature extraction technique and a traditional clustering method.

Type: Article
Title: Empirical comparison of text-based mobile apps similarity measurement techniques
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-019-09726-5
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2019 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: App store analysis, Software clustering, Mobile applications Clustering, Feature extraction Cluster analysis
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10074471
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