Our current research is centered on a new approach for software classification and retrieval. Major requirements for the system are good retrieval performance, cost-effectiveness and domain independence. The central idea of the project we are working on is to allow the automatic classification and retrieval of software through simple sentences in natural language describing the software functionality and take advantage of the lexical, syntactic and semantic information that is possible to extract from these sentences to construct queries and indexing units more useful and precise than traditional keyword descriptors. Experiments with a first prototype of the system are being conducted through various case studies.
Early results show important improvements over keyword-based systems.