Assisting concept assignment using probabilistic classification and cognitive mapping

The problem of concept assignment, that is, the problem of mapping human oriented concepts to elements in the code base of a system under study, and approaches which facilitate concept assignment can be considered as central to assisting software engineers in comprehending the unfamiliar systems they encounter. This paper presents a technique called cognitive assignment that attempts to capture what expert engineers know about the systems they work with and uses that information to generate classifiers that are used to implement a ranked search over a set of software elements.