STAC: A tool for Static Textual Analysis of Code

Static textual analysis techniques have been recently applied to process and synthesize source code. The underlying tenet is that important information is embedded in code identifiers and internal code comments. Such information can be analyzed to provide automatic aid for several software engineering activities. To facilitate this line of work, we present STAC, a tool for supporting Static Textual Analysis of Code. STAC is designed as a light-weight stand-alone tool that provides a practical one-stop solution for code indexing. Code indexing is the process of extracting important textual information from source code. Accurate indexing has been found to significantly influence the performance of code retrieval and analysis methods. STAC provides features for extracting and processing textual patterns found in Java, C++, and C# code artifacts. These features include identifier splitting, stemming, lemmatization, and spell-checking. STAC is also provided as an API to help researchers to integrate basic code indexing features into their code.