Primary Research Interests:

• Machine Learning for Code/Code Changes Modeling
• Empirical Studies of Pre-trained Language Models of Code[SANER-22] [ICPC-22]
• Code Representation Enhancement[SANER-22] [FSE-22]
• Code Compression for Big Language Models of Code[ASE-22]
• Software Text Analytics for Software Automation
• Interconnected Software Data Prediction [ESEM-18-Extension] [ASE-16]
• Representation Learning of Software Data [TSE-21]
• Sentiment Analysis for Software Engineering [ICSME-20]
• Biases in Bug Report Analytics [TOSEM-22]
• Understand and Assist Software Practice
• Code Reuse and Re-implementation [EMSE-19]
• Automatic Code Review [PAKDD-19]
• Automatic Answer Summarization Tool for Technical Query [ICSE-23-Tool Demo] [ASE-22] [ESEC/FSE-19-Tool Demo] [ASE-17]
• Automatic Relevant Question Retrival Tool for Technical Query [ESEC/FSE-17-Tool Demo] [EMSE-17-Extension] [MSR-16]

News

Selected Publications

Conference Papers

• [C16] Chen Gong, Zhou Yang, Yunpeng Bai, Jieke Shi, Arunesh Sinha, Bowen Xu, David Lo, Xinwen Hou, Guoliang Fan. Curiosity-Driven and Victim-Aware Adversarial Policies. The Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Won Honorable Mention Award
• [C15] Chengran Yang, Bowen Xu, Ferdian Thung, Yucen Shi, Ting Zhang, Zhou Yang, Xin Zhou, Jieke Shi, Junda He, DongGyun Han, David Lo. Answer Summarization for Technical Queries: Benchmark and New Approach. The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF
• [C14] Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, Bowen Xu, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo. Compressing Pre-trained Models of Code into 3 MB. The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Nominated for ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
• [C13] Yucen Shi, Ying Yin, Zhengkui Wang, David Lo, Tao Zhang, Xin Xia, Yuhai Zhao, Bowen Xu. How to Better Utilize Code Graphs in Semantic Code Search?. The 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF
• [C12] Junda He, Bowen Xu, Zhou Yang, DongGyun Han, Chengran Yang and David Lo. PTM4Tag: Sharpening Tag Recommendation of Stack Overflow with Pre-trained Models. 30th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2022). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Code Invited to Empirical Software Engineering Journal
• [C11] Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, Junda He, Bowen Xu and David Lo. Can Identifier Splitting Improve Open-Vocabulary Language Model of Code?. 29th IEEE International Conference onSoftware Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2022). Accepted as a ERA track Paper. PDF Code
• [C10] Chengran Yang, Bowen Xu, Junaed Younus Khan, Gias Uddin, Donggyun Han, Zhou Yang and David Lo. Aspect-Based API Review Classification: How Far Can Pre-Trained Transformer Model Go?. 29th IEEE International Conference onSoftware Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2022). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Code
• [C9] Ting Zhang, Bowen Xu, Ferdian Thung, Stefanus Agus Haryono, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang. Sentiment Analysis for Software Engineering: How Far Can Pre-trained Transformer Models Go?. 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2020). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Code
• [C8] Heng-Yi Li, Shu-Ting Shi, Ferdian Thung, Xuan Huo, Bowen Xu, Ming Li, and David Lo. DeepReview: Automatic Code Review using Deep Multi-Instance Learning. The 23rd Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2019). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF
• [C7] Bowen Xu, Amirreza Shirani, David Lo and Mohammad Amin Alipour. Prediction of Relatedness in Stack Overflow: Deep Learning vs. SVM - A Reproducibility Study. 12th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2018). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Slide Code Won Highly Commended Full Paper Award
• [C6] Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo. AnswerBot - Automated Generation of Answer Summary to Developers' Technical Questions. 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2017). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Code Slide Poster
• [C5] Bowen Xu, Deheng Ye, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, Guibin Chen, Shanping Li. Predicting Semantically Linkable Knowledge in Developer Online Forums via Convolutional Neural Network. 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2016). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Code
• [C4] Guibin Chen, Chunyang Chen, Zhenchang Xing, Bowen Xu. Learning a Dual-Language Vector Space for Domain-Specific Cross-Lingual Question Retrieval. 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2016). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF
• [C3] Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Qingye Wang, Shanping Li. Domain-Specific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval. 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2016). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF Invited to Empirical Software Engineering Journal
• [C2] Bowen Xu, David Lo, Xin Xia, Ashish Sureka, Shanping Li. EFSPredictor: Predicting Configuration Bugs With Ensemble Feature Selection. 22nd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2015). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF
• [C1] Yun Zhang, David Lo, Xin Xia, Bowen Xu, Jianling Sun, Shanping Li. Combining Software Metrics and Text Features for Vulnerable File Prediction. 20th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2015). Accepted as a Full Paper. PDF

Journal Papers

• [J4] Ting Zhang, DongGyun Han, Venkatesh Vinayakarao, Ivana Irsan, Bowen Xu, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang. Duplicate Bug Report Detection: How Far Are We?. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). Accepted.
• [J3] Bowen Xu, Thong Hoang, Abhishek Sharma, Chengran Yang, Xin Xia, and David Lo. Post2Vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Stack Overflow Posts. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). Accepted. PREPRINT
• [J2] Bowen Xu, Le An, Ferdian Thung, Foutse Khomh, David Lo. Why Reinventing the Wheels? An Empirical Study on Library Reuse and Re-implementation. Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE). Accepted. PREPRINT Code
• [J1] Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li. Domain-Specific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval. Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE). Accepted. PREPRINT

Tool Demo Papers

• [T3] Chengran Yang, Bowen Xu, Jiakun Liu, David Lo. TECHSUMBOT: A Stack Overflow Answer Summarization Tool for Technical Query. The 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023). Accepted as a tool demo paper. PDF Video Demo Code
• [T2] Liang Cai, Haoye Wang, Bowen Xu, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Zhenchang Xing. AnswerBot: An Answer Summary Generation Tool Based on Stack Overflow. The 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2019). Accepted as a tool demo paper. PDF Video Demo Code
• [T1] Bowen Xu, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo Xuan-Bach D. Le. XSearch: A DomainSpecific Cross-Language Relevant Question Retrieval Tool. 11th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2017). Accepted as a tool demo paper. PDF Video Demo

Workshop Papers

• [W1] Amirreza Shirani, Bowen Xu, David Lo, Thamar Solorio and Mohammad Amin Alipour. Question Relatedness on Stack Overflow: The Task, Dataset, and Corpus-inspired Model. AAAI 2019 Reasoning and Complex QA Workshop (AAAI-RCQA).

PhD Dissertation

• Bowen Xu. Learning to Interpret Knowledge from Software Question and Answer Sites. PhD Dissertation, Singapore Management University, 2021. PDF.

Talks

• Post2Vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Stack Overflow Posts, ICSE 2022 Journal First, 27 May 2022, Mining Software Repositories 1
• Why Reinventing the Wheels? An Empirical Study on Library Reuse and Re-implementation, ICSE 2020 Journal First, 10 Jul 2020, I21-Version Control and Programming
• Benchmarking Example-Based Program Transformation Inference Tools, Workshop on Program Transformation, 7 Dec 2020, Seminar Room 3-1, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore

Selected Professional Services

• Journal Referee, TOSEM 2022 and EMSE 2022, TOIS 2020 and JSS 2020.
• Program Committee, Data and Tool Showcase Track, The 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR'22).
• Co-Organizer, the workshop MaLTeSQuE'22 (collocated with ESEC/FSE'22).

Bio

I am a Research Scientist (Post-Doc) in the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS) at Singapore Management University (SMU). I got my PhD in August 2021 from SCIS at SMU, supervised by Prof. David Lo. Before I joined SMU, I received my Master Degree of Engineering in June 2017 from the College of Computer Science and Technology of Zhejiang University, supervised by Prof. Shanping Li and Prof. Xin Xia. During my master career, I was a visiting student in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, supervised by Prof. Zhenchang Xing.

Teaching

• January, 2020 - April, 2020: Teaching Assistant
  IS706 - Software Mining and Analysis, Singapore Management University (SMU)
  Responsibility:
  • Design, and prepare the materials of the in-class exercise. And instruct and Q&A during the class.
  • Lead the paper reading discussion.
  • Students' feedback
• Graduate Instructor Certification, Singapore Management University, Singapore, 2019.

Supervision

With the support of Prof. Lo, I am honored to mentor/collaborate the following students.

• Ting Zhang, PhD on the work ICSME 2020, TOSEM 2022
• Chengran Yang, PhD on the work TSE 2021, SANER & ASE 2022
• Jieke Shi, PhD on the work SANER & ASE 2022
• Junda He, PhD on the work ICPC 2022