---
category: academic
type: academic
person: Yanxin Lu
date: 2014
source: nguyen_14_staminer.pdf
---

# Statistical Learning Approach for Mining API Usage Mappings for Code Migration

Anh Tuan Nguyen, Hoan Anh Nguyen, Tung Thanh Nguyen, Tien N. Nguyen (Iowa State University, Utah State University)

ASE 2014

The same software product nowadays could appear in multiple platforms and devices. To address business needs, software companies develop a product in one language and then migrate it to another. The authors introduce StaMiner, a novel data-driven approach that statistically learns the mappings between APIs from the corpus of the corresponding client code of the APIs in two languages Java and C#. Instead of using heuristics on textual or structural similarity to map API methods and classes, StaMiner is based on a statistical model that learns the mappings from a corpus and provides mappings for APIs with all possible arities. Empirical evaluation shows StaMiner can detect API usage mappings with higher accuracy than state-of-the-art approaches. With the resulting API mappings mined by StaMiner, Java2CSharp, an existing migration tool, could achieve a higher level of accuracy.