An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow
This work addresses the issue of unanswered questions for Stack Overflow users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing research with a new predictive approach.
The paper tackled the problem of unresolved questions on Stack Overflow by analyzing 3,956 such questions and proposing a prediction model based on user behavior, topics, and popularity metrics. The model achieved 78.70% precision and 76.10% recall in predicting unresolved questions using 8,057 questions.
For a significant number of questions at Stack Overflow, none of the posted answers were accepted as solutions. Acceptance of an answer indicates that the answer actually solves the discussed problem in the question, and the question is answered sufficiently. In this paper, we investigate 3,956 such unresolved questions using an exploratory study where we analyze four important aspects of those questions, their answers and the corresponding users that partially explain the observed scenario. We then propose a prediction model by employing five metrics related to user behaviour, topics and popularity of question, which predicts if the best answer for a question at Stack Overflow might remain unaccepted or not. Experiments using 8,057 questions show that the model can predict unresolved questions with 78.70% precision and 76.10% recall.