MULA: A Just-In-Time Multi-labeling System for Issue Reports

A very important function of an issue tracking system is to assign labels to issue reports, such as bug, feature, enhancement, etc., in order to categorize issues to facilitate various development activities. In practice, it is very common that an issue has multiple labels. However, current works are mainly based on single-label prediction, which are not suitable for just-in-time multi-labeling services, due to the low efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we propose MULA, a just-in-time MUlti-LAbeling system, which learns and automatically assigns multiple labels to issue reports. We have built a dataset with 81,601 entries and 11 labels, as the first benchmark for this task, and implemented a GitHub app. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work and tool for online multi-labeling GitHub issues based on their categories. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study, including comparisons with five commonly adopted labeling models that show the superiority of MULA, as well as an evaluation that shows high consistency between MULA’s suggestions and developers’ opinions.