Extracting API tips from developer question and answer websites

Shaohua Wang, Nhathai Phan, Yan Wang, Yong Zhao

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

The success of question and answer (Q&A) websites attracts massive user-generated content for using and learning APIs, which easily leads to information overload: many questions for APIs have a large number of answers containing useful and irrelevant information, and cannot all be consumed by developers. In this work, we develop DeepTip, a novel deep learning-based approach using different Convolutional Neural Network architectures, to extract short practical and useful tips from developer answers. Our extensive empirical experiments prove that DeepTip can extract useful tips from a large corpus of answers to questions with high precision (i.e., avg. 0.854) and coverage (i.e., 0.94), and it outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines by up to 56.7% and 162%, respectively, in terms of Precision. Furthermore, qualitatively, a user study is conducted with real Stack Overflow users and its results confirm that tip extraction is useful and our approach generates high-quality tips.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages321-332
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781728134123
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Event16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: May 26 2019May 27 2019

Publication series

NameIEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Volume2019-May
ISSN (Print)2160-1852
ISSN (Electronic)2160-1860

Conference

Conference16th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period5/26/195/27/19

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software

Keywords

  • API
  • CNN
  • Deep learning
  • Sentence classification
  • Tip extraction

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Extracting API tips from developer question and answer websites'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this