A Multimodal Deep Learning Model Using Text, Image, and Code Data for Improving Issue Classification Tasks

Abstract

Issue reports are valuable resources for the continuous maintenance and improvement of software. Managing issue reports requires a significant effort from developers. To address this problem, many researchers have proposed automated techniques for classifying issue reports. However, those techniques fall short of yielding reasonable classification accuracy. We notice that those techniques rely on text-based unimodal models. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal model-based classification technique to use heterogeneous information in issue reports for issue classification. The proposed technique combines information from text, images, and code of issue reports. To evaluate the proposed technique, we conduct experiments with four different projects. The experiments compare the performance of the proposed technique with text-based unimodal models. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves a 5.07% to 14.12% higher F1-score than the text-based unimodal models. Our findings demonstrate that utilizing heterogeneous data of issue reports helps improve the performance of issue classification.