Concept location, the problem of associating human oriented concepts with their counterpart solution domain concepts, is a
fundamental problem that lies at the heart of software comprehension. Recent research has attempted to alleviate the impact
of the concept location problem through the application of methods drawn from the information retrieval (IR) community. Here
we present a new approach based on a complimentary IR method which also has a sound basis in cognitive theory. We compare
our approach to related work through an experiment and present our conclusions. This research adapts and expands upon existing
language modelling frameworks in IR for use in concept location, in software systems. In doing so it is novel in that it leverages
implicit information available in system documentation. Surprisingly, empirical evaluation of this approach showed little
performance benefit overall and several possible explanations are forwarded for this finding.
Keywords Information retrieval - Software comprehension - Empirical analysis
Editors: Tim Menzies and Letha Etzkorn