Automatic indexing is required to turn software retrieval systems cost-effective.
This situation is particularly critical in software retrieval where users require high precision, i.e. they expect to retrieve only the best components for reuse, avoiding to have to select the best one from a list that can contain many irrelevant components. Natural language processing techniques, for the acquisition of lexical, syntactic and semantic information from software descriptions, are potentially useful to improve retrieval effectiveness and to reduce the cost of creating and maintaining software libraries. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the main mechanisms in the current version of the reuse system. Section 3 outlines the semantic formalism used to identify, in a software description the knowledge needed to catalogue a component in a software base.