---
category: academic
type: academic
person: Yanxin Lu
date: 2014
source: gokhale_14_data.pdf
---

# Data-Driven Inference of API Mappings

Amruta Gokhale, Daeyoung Kim, Vinod Ganapathy (Rutgers University)

PROMOTO 2014

Porting mobile applications from one platform to another is one strategy used by developers to write cross-platform apps. One challenging task in porting is transforming the app to use the appropriate platform-specific APIs. The authors propose a novel approach to extract functionally equivalent API methods of two platforms, inspired by a technique in natural language processing that extracts a translation dictionary from non-parallel corpora of two natural languages. The approach statically analyses reverse-engineered code of the app to construct program paths, which form sentences in an unknown language where words are individual API methods. These are fed to an inference engine that extracts mappings between words of the two languages.