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PAPER: 19 TITLE: Clustering OSS License Statements Toward Automatic Generation of License Rules AUTHORS: Yunosuke Higashi, Yuki Manabe and Masao Ohira
This paper presented an approach to automatically cluster files with license statements that are unable to be detected by existing rule-based license identification tools. The authors used grep and hierarchical clustering to group these files. The approach was applied on 2838 unknown license files of Debian version 7.8.0.
Points in favour
This paper tackles an interesting problem which is both relevant in research and practice. The research problem is well motivated. The paper is well-structured and the writing is clear.
Points against
In the grep step, to identify the BSD licenses, the authors used the discriminant conditions and the flow conditions shown in Figure 2. There are four clauses in that figure. It is not clear to me what do those clauses mean (e.g., what is "neither the name"? what is "all advertising materials"?). Please briefly describe them in the paper.
In the discussion, the authors explained the rationale behind the not "so high" precision (0.89). But they did not explain the reasons behind the even lower recall (0.64).
The authors calculated the precision/recall/F-value for the grep step. For the clustering step, the authors used another set of metrics (ratio of SLC, ratio of SF, etc.). However, these metrics are not standard performance evaluation metrics. It would be useful to show the actual precision/recall/F-value just as the grep step.
