arXiv subjects

Khaled Badran

Publications and source records attributed to Khaled Badran.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Transformer-based Approach for Augmenting Software Engineering Chatbots Datasets

Background: The adoption of chatbots into software development tasks has become increasingly popular among practitioners, driven by the advantages of cost reduction and acceleration of the software development process. Chatbots understand users' queries through the Natural Language Understanding component (NLU). To yield reasonable performance, NLUs have to be trained with extensive, high-quality datasets, that express a multitude of ways users may interact with chatbots. However, previous studies show that creating a high-quality training dataset for software engineering chatbots is expensive in terms of both resources and time. Aims: Therefore, in this paper, we present an automated transformer-based approach to augment software engineering chatbot datasets. Method: Our approach combines traditional natural language processing techniques with the BART transformer to augment a dataset by generating queries through synonym replacement and paraphrasing. We evaluate the impact of using the augmentation approach on the Rasa NLU's performance using three software engineering datasets. Results: Overall, the augmentation approach shows promising results in improving the Rasa's performance, augmenting queries with varying sentence structures while preserving their original semantics. Furthermore, it increases Rasa's confidence in its intent classification for the correctly classified intents. Conclusions: We believe that our study helps practitioners improve the performance of their chatbots and guides future research to propose augmentation techniques for SE chatbots.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Can Ensembling Pre-processing Algorithms Lead to Better Machine Learning Fairness?

As machine learning (ML) systems get adopted in more critical areas, it has become increasingly crucial to address the bias that could occur in these systems. Several fairness pre-processing algorithms are available to alleviate implicit biases during model training. These algorithms employ different concepts of fairness, often leading to conflicting strategies with consequential trade-offs between fairness and accuracy. In this work, we evaluate three popular fairness pre-processing algorithms and investigate the potential for combining all algorithms into a more robust pre-processing ensemble. We report on lessons learned that can help practitioners better select fairness algorithms for their models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A Comparison of Natural Language Understanding Platforms for Chatbots in Software Engineering

Chatbots are envisioned to dramatically change the future of Software Engineering, allowing practitioners to chat and inquire about their software projects and interact with different services using natural language. At the heart of every chatbot is a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component that enables the chatbot to understand natural language input. Recently, many NLU platforms were provided to serve as an off-the-shelf NLU component for chatbots, however, selecting the best NLU for Software Engineering chatbots remains an open challenge. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate four of the most commonly used NLUs, namely IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, Rasa, and Microsoft LUIS to shed light on which NLU should be used in Software Engineering based chatbots. Specifically, we examine the NLUs' performance in classifying intents, confidence scores stability, and extracting entities. To evaluate the NLUs, we use two datasets that reflect two common tasks performed by Software Engineering practitioners, 1) the task of chatting with the chatbot to ask questions about software repositories 2) the task of asking development questions on Q&A forums (e.g., Stack Overflow). According to our findings, IBM Watson is the best performing NLU when considering the three aspects (intents classification, confidence scores, and entity extraction). However, the results from each individual aspect show that, in intents classification, IBM Watson performs the best with an F1-measure > 84%, but in confidence scores, Rasa comes on top with a median confidence score higher than 0.91. Our results also show that all NLUs, except for Dialogflow, generally provide trustable confidence scores. For entity extraction, Microsoft LUIS and IBM Watson outperform other NLUs in the two SE tasks. Our results provide guidance to software engineering practitioners when deciding which NLU to use in their chatbots.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2019

MSRBot: Using Bots to Answer Questions from Software Repositories

Software repositories contain a plethora of useful information that can be used to enhance software projects. Prior work has leveraged repository data to improve many aspects of the software development process, such as, help extract requirement decisions, identify potentially defective code and improve maintenance and evolution. However, in many cases, practitioners are not able to fully benefit from software repositories due to the fact that they need special expertise and dedicated effort to mine their repositories. Therefore, in this paper, we use bots to automate and ease the process of extracting useful information from software repositories. Particularly, we lay out an approach of how bots, layered on top of software repositories, can be used to answer some of the most common software development/maintenance questions facing developers. We perform a preliminary study with 12 participants to validate the effectiveness of the bot. Our findings indicate that using bots achieves very promising results in terms of answer accuracy, speed and usefulness. Our work has the potential to transform the MSR field by significantly lowering the barrier to entry, making the extraction of useful information from software repositories as easy as chatting with a bot.

cs.SE↗