  Issue-commit links, as a type of software traceability links, play a vital
role in various software development and maintenance tasks. However, they are
typically deficient, as developers often forget or fail to create tags when
making commits. Existing studies have deployed deep learning techniques,
including pretrained models, to improve automatic issue-commit link
recovery.Despite their promising performance, we argue that previous approaches
have four main problems, hindering them from recovering links in large software
projects. To overcome these problems, we propose an efficient and accurate
pre-trained framework called EALink for issue-commit link recovery. EALink
requires much fewer model parameters than existing pre-trained methods,
bringing efficient training and recovery. Moreover, we design various
techniques to improve the recovery accuracy of EALink. We construct a
large-scale dataset and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the power
of EALink. Results show that EALink outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by
a large margin (15.23%-408.65%) on various evaluation metrics. Meanwhile, its
training and inference overhead is orders of magnitude lower than existing
methods.
