Mining detailed information from the description for App functions comparison

• Published in: IET software Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 94 - 110
• Main Authors: Liu, Huaxiao, Yin, Xinglong, Song, Shanshan, Gao, Shanquan, Zhang, Mengxi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 01.02.2022
• Subjects: data analysis; data mining; mobile computing; Web services
• ISSN: 1751-8806; 1751-8814
• DOI: 10.1049/sfw2.12042

The rapid development of Apps not only brings huge economic benefit but also causes increasingly fierce competition. In such a situation, developers are required to develop and update innovative functions to attract and retain users. Afterwards, analysing the functions of similar products can help developers formulate a well‐designed plan at the beginning of development as well as make updated strategies during the version update process. However, although there have been some methods that can be applied to extract the features from App descriptions to achieve this purpose to some extent, the features they obtained do not cover the details of App functions. Therefore, to conduct an in‐depth research on App functions, a novel method is proposed to extract App features with detailed information and an approach to integrate the gained results for further helping developers obtain the valuable knowledge better is provided. Subsequently, a series of experiments is carried out to evaluate our method. The results reveal that the proposed method can mine the features with detailed information from descriptions and integrate them effectively and also can assist developers to compare with other competitors and develop a better competitive analysis scheme.