Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

8-2019

Abstract

The prevalence of questions and answers on domainspecific Q&A sites like Stack Overflow constitutes a core knowledge asset for software engineering domain. Although search engines can return a list of questions relevant to a user query of some technical question, the abundance of relevant posts and the sheer amount of information in them makes it difficult for developers to digest them and find the most needed answers to their questions. In this work, we aim to help developers who want to quickly capture the key points of several answer posts relevant to a technical question before they read the details of the posts. We formulate our task as a query-focused multianswer-posts summarization task for a given technical question. Our proposed approach AnswerBot contains three main steps : 1) relevant question retrieval, 2) useful answer paragraph selection, 3) diverse answer summary generation. To evaluate our approach, we build a repository of 228,817 Java questions and their corresponding answers from Stack Overflow. We conduct user studies with 100 randomly selected Java questions (not in the question repository) to evaluate the quality of the answer summaries generated by our approach, and the effectiveness of its relevant question retrieval and answer paragraph selection components. The user study results demonstrate that answer summaries generated by our approach are relevant, useful and diverse; moreover, the two components are able to effectively retrieve relevant questions and select salient answer paragraphs for summarization

Keywords

summary generation, question retrieval, stack overflow

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ESEC/FSE '19: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Tallinn, Estonia, August 26-30

First Page

1134

Last Page

1138

ISBN

9781450355728

Identifier

10.1145/3338906.3341186

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Publisher

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3338906.3341186

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