Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-6-2019

Abstract

Background: Despite the well-documented and numerous recent successes of deep learning, the application of standard deep architectures to many classification problems within empirical software engineering remains problematic due to the large volumes of labeled data required for training. Here we make the argument that, for some problems, this hurdle can be overcome by taking advantage of low-shot learning in combination with simpler deep architectures that reduce the total number of parameters that need to be learned.

Findings: We apply low-shot learning to the task of classifying UML class and sequence diagrams from Github, and demonstrate that surprisingly good performance can be achieved by using only tens or hundreds of examples for each category when paired with an appropriate architecture. Using a large, off-the-shelf architecture, on the other hand, doesn’t perform beyond random guessing even when trained on thousands of samples.

Conclusion: Our findings suggest that identifying problems within empirical software engineering that lend themselves to low-shot learning could accelerate the adoption of deep learning algorithms within the empirical software engineering community.

Comments

This article was originally published in Journal of Big Data, volume 6, in 2019. DOI: 10.1186/s40537-019-0198-z

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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