Textual allusions to artifacts in software-related repositories

Much of what is written about a software project is soon forgotten. Software repositories are full of valuable information about the project: Bug descriptions, check-in messages, email and newsgroup archives, specifications, design documents, product documentation, and product support logs contain a wealth of information that can potentially help software developers resolve crucial questions about the history, rationale, and future plans for source code. For a variety of reasons, developers rarely turn to these resources when trying to answer these questions. We are building a full-text search that encompasses multiple repositories. To effectively implement full-text search in the absence of hyperlinks we propose detecting textual allusions to software artifacts in natural-language prose. Allusions are shown to contribute a significant portion of the relationships represented in the graph. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Information storage and retrieval]: Content Analysis an