Bug Localization with Semantic and Structural Features using Convolutional Neural Network and Cascade Forest

Background: Correctly localizing buggy files for bug reports together with their semantic and structural information is a crucial task, which would essentially improve the accuracy of bug localization techniques. Aims: To empirically evaluate and demonstrate the effects of both semantic and structural information in bug reports and source files on improving the performance of bug localization, we propose CNN_Forest involving convolutional neural network and ensemble of random forests that have excellent performance in the tasks of semantic parsing and structural information extraction. Method: We first employ convolutional neural network with multiple filters and an ensemble of random forests with multi-grained scanning to extract semantic and structural features from the word vectors derived from bug reports and source files. And a subsequent cascade forest (a cascade of ensembles of random forests) is used to further extract deeper features and observe the correlated relationships between bug reports and source files. CNNLForest is then empirically evaluated over 10,754 bug reports extracted from AspectJ, Eclipse UI, JDT, SWT, and Tomcat projects. Results: The experiments empirically demonstrate the significance of including semantic and structural information in bug localization, and further show that the proposed CNN_Forest achieves higher Mean Average Precision and Mean Reciprocal Rank measures than the best results of the four current state-of-the-art approaches (NPCNN, LR+WE, DNNLOC, and BugLocator). Conclusion: CNNLForest is capable of defining the correlated relationships between bug reports and source files, and we empirically show that semantic and structural information in bug reports and source files are crucial in improving bug localization.