Categorizing npm Packages by Analyzing the Text Information in Software Repositories

Abstract

To prevent JavaScript developers from reinventing wheels, npm ecosystem provides numerous third-party libraries for developers to realize relevant functionalities. Npm displays the tags provided by the creators for these packages to help developers find suitable ones. However, not all creators have the habit of tagging their packages, and thus npm cannot provide tag information of a lot of packages for developers to help them understand the package functionalities effectively. Considering that many tags are unrelated to the functionality of packages, we propose a method to find out the tags that are important to distinguish the functionality categories of packages and assign them to untagged packages for assisting developers in the process of retrieving the packages. Firstly, we analyze the attribute of existing tags in npm to establish category tags (functionality categories). Then, we further mine the readme of tagged packages to generate keywords for each category tag. Finally, our method identifies category tags for untagged packages by measuring the similarity between their readme and the keywords of category tags. The evaluation demonstrates that our approach has a good performance in assigning category tags to untagged packages.