SEJul 19, 2020

Code2Que: A Tool for Improving Question Titles from Mined Code Snippets in Stack Overflow

arXiv:2007.10851v118 citations
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

This addresses a specific issue for software developers using Stack Overflow, but it is incremental as it builds on existing sequence-to-sequence methods.

The paper tackles the problem of low-quality questions on Stack Overflow by introducing Code2Que, a web-based tool that generates question titles from code snippets to assist developers, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular technical Q&A sites used by software developers. Seeking help from Stack Overflow has become an essential part of software developers' daily work for solving programming-related questions. Although the Stack Overflow community has provided quality assurance guidelines to help users write better questions, we observed that a significant number of questions submitted to Stack Overflow are of low quality. In this paper, we introduce a new web-based tool, Code2Que, which can help developers in writing higher quality questions for a given code snippet. Code2Que consists of two main stages: offline learning and online recommendation. In the offline learning phase, we first collect a set of good quality <code snippet, question> pairs as training samples. We then train our model on these training samples via a deep sequence-to-sequence approach, enhanced with an attention mechanism, a copy mechanism and a coverage mechanism. In the online recommendation phase, for a given code snippet, we use the offline trained model to generate question titles to assist less experienced developers in writing questions more effectively. At the same time, we embed the given code snippet into a vector and retrieve the related questions with similar problematic code snippets.

Foundations

The foundational work for this paper's niche, ranked by how specifically the neighbourhood builds on it — not by global fame.

Your Notes