Abstract
Software Q&A sites (like Stack Overflow) play an essential role in developers day-to-day work for problem-solving. Although search engines (like Google) are widely used to obtain a list of relevant posts for technical problems, we observed that the redundant relevant posts and sheer amount of information barriers developers to digest and identify the useful answers. In this paper, we propose a tool AnswerBot which enables to automatically generate an answer summary for a technical problem. AnswerBot consists of three main stages, (1) relevant question retrieval, (2) useful answer paragraph selection, (3) diverse answer summary generation. We implement it in the form of a search engine website. To evaluate AnswerBot, we first build a repository includes a large number of Java questions and their corresponding answers from Stack Overflow. Then, we conduct a user study that evaluates the answer summary generated by AnswerBot and two baselines (based on Google and Stack Overflow search engine) for 100 queries. The results show that the answer summaries generated by AnswerBot are more relevant, useful, and diverse. Moreover, we also substantially improved the efficiency of AnswerBot (from 309 to 8 seconds per query).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ESEC/FSE ’19 - Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting, European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering |
Editors | Marlon Dumas, Dietmar Pfahl, Sven Apel, Alessandra Russo |
Place of Publication | New York NY USA |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
Pages | 1134-1138 |
Number of pages | 5 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450355728 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Event | Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2019 - Tallinn, Estonia Duration: 26 Aug 2019 → 30 Aug 2019 Conference number: 27th https://esec-fse19.ut.ee/ |
Conference
Conference | Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2019 |
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Abbreviated title | ESEC/FSE 2019 |
Country | Estonia |
City | Tallinn |
Period | 26/08/19 → 30/08/19 |
Internet address |
Keywords
- Relevant Question Retrieval
- Stack Overflow
- Summary Generation