SONAS: A System to Obtain Insights on Web APIs from Stack Overflow

In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development of types and quantities of Web APIs. However, it is challenging for users to select Web APIs that best match their requirements and to learn how to invoke a Web API correctly. Although Web API providers often publish documents that describe the functionalities of Web APIs and how to use them, users still have to collect information to acquire knowledge about the usage information of Web APIs. Stack Overflow, the largest programming-related question-and-answer (Q&A) website, has many posts about Web APIs. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a System to Obtain iNsights on Web APIs from Stack Overflow (SONAS). SONAS collects questions related to Web APIs and classifies them into different categories using a deep learning model. The statistics on the numbers of different types of questions indicate the usage information of Web APIs. Furthermore, SONAS predicts the future usage trends of Web APIs, based on a long short-term memory model with multi-task learning. The experiments on a real-world dataset prove SONAS can provide useful insights on Web APIs.