HiGitClass: Keyword-Driven Hierarchical Classification of GitHub Repositories


Abstract in English

GitHub has become an important platform for code sharing and scientific exchange. With the massive number of repositories available, there is a pressing need for topic-based search. Even though the topic label functionality has been introduced, the majority of GitHub repositories do not have any labels, impeding the utility of search and topic-based analysis. This work targets the automatic repository classification problem as textit{keyword-driven hierarchical classification}. Specifically, users only need to provide a label hierarchy with keywords to supply as supervision. This setting is flexible, adaptive to the users needs, accounts for the different granularity of topic labels and requires minimal human effort. We identify three key challenges of this problem, namely (1) the presence of multi-modal signals; (2) supervision scarcity and bias; (3) supervision format mismatch. In recognition of these challenges, we propose the textsc{HiGitClass} framework, comprising of three modules: heterogeneous information network embedding; keyword enrichment; topic modeling and pseudo document generation. Experimental results on two GitHub repository collections confirm that textsc{HiGitClass} is superior to existing weakly-supervised and dataless hierarchical classification methods, especially in its ability to integrate both structured and unstructured data for repository classification.

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