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
Citation
CAI, Liang; WANG, Haoye; XU, Bowen; HUANG, Qiao; XIA, Xin; LO, David; and XING, Zhenchang.
AnswerBot: An answer summary generation tool based on stack overflow. (2019). 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. 1134-1138.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4488
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3338906.3341186