IMPROVING AUTOMATIC ABBREVIATION EXPANSION WITHIN SOURCE CODE TO AID IN PROGRAM SEARCH TOOLS by

Software maintenance is an important part of the software lifecycle. Understanding large software systems that are unfamiliar can be difficult for maintenance programmers. Intelligent and robust search tools are one method for facilitating program understanding and comprehension. One of the major problems associated with improving search tools is the use of abbreviations within software. The focus of this thesis is proposing and evaluating an automatic approach to expanding abbreviations in search tools. The results of our evaluation demonstrated that the first implementation of our approach made significant improvement over no abbreviation expansion with respect to search tools. Furthermore, the improved implementation returned even better results qualitatively than the initial approach.