English

Automating API Documentation with LLMs: A BERTopic Approach

Software Engineering 2025-09-09 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Developers rely on API documentation, but official sources are often lengthy, complex, or incomplete. Many turn to community-driven forums like Stack Overflow for practical insights. We propose automating the summarization of informal sources, focusing on Android APIs. Using BERTopic, we extracted prevalent topics from 3.6 million Stack Overflow posts and applied extractive summarization techniques to generate concise summaries, including code snippets. A user study with 30 Android developers assessed the summaries for coherence, relevance, informativeness, and satisfaction, showing improved productivity. Integrating formal API knowledge with community-generated content enhances documentation, making API resources more accessible and actionable work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.05749,
  title  = {Automating API Documentation with LLMs: A BERTopic Approach},
  author = {AmirHossein Naghshzan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.05749},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:24:29.275Z