Improved Natural Language Searching by Included Structural Information

As applications become more complex with millions of lines of code, maintaining this code becomes an increasing burden. One fundamental set of tools involved in helping code maintenance finds segments of code given a higher-level concept. Although a number of techniques exist for this task, they have a number of issues. This paper discusses these limitations and proposes a number of techniques and studies which help define the problem, create bench marks and significantly improve the results of state of the art methods.