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ESEC/FSE 2021
Thu 19 - Sat 28 August 2021 Clowdr Platform

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers as a popular way to seek programming-related information from peers via the internet. Previous studies have shown that a significant number of these questions are of low-quality and not attractive to other potential experts in Stack Overflow. These poorly asked questions are less likely to receive useful answers and hinder the overall knowledge generation and sharing process. Considering one of the reasons for introducing low-quality questions in SO is that many developers may not be able to clarify and summarize the key problems behind their presented code snippets due to their lack of knowledge and terminology related to the problem, and/or their poor writing skills, in this study we propose an approach to assist developers in writing high-quality questions by automatically generating question titles for a code snippet using a deep sequence-to-sequence learning approach. Our approach is fully data-driven and uses an \textit{attention} mechanism to perform better content selection, a copy mechanism to handle the rare-words problem, and a coverage mechanism to eliminate word repetition problem. We evaluate our approach on Stack Overflow datasets over a variety of programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Javascript, C# and SQL) and our experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines in both automatic and human evaluation. We have released our code and datasets to facilitate other researchers to verify their ideas and inspire the follow-up work.

Wed 25 Aug

Displayed time zone: Athens change

08:00 - 09:00
Analytics & Software Evolution—Code RecommendationJournal First / Research Papers +12h
Chair(s): Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila, Saikat Chakraborty Columbia University
08:00
10m
Paper
Cross-Language Code Search using Static and Dynamic AnalysesArtifacts Available
Research Papers
George Mathew North Carolina State University, Kathryn Stolee North Carolina State University
DOI
08:10
10m
Paper
Automating the Removal of Obsolete TODO Comments
Research Papers
Zhipeng Gao Monash University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, David Lo Singapore Management University, John Grundy Monash University, Thomas Zimmermann Microsoft Research
DOI
08:20
10m
Paper
Generating Question Titles for Stack Overflow from Mined Code Snippets
Journal First
Zhipeng Gao Monash University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, John Grundy Monash University, David Lo Singapore Management University, Yuan-Fang Li Monash University
08:30
30m
Live Q&A
Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Code Recommendation)
Research Papers

20:00 - 21:00
Analytics & Software Evolution—Code RecommendationResearch Papers / Journal First
Chair(s): Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila, Saikat Chakraborty Columbia University
20:00
10m
Paper
Cross-Language Code Search using Static and Dynamic AnalysesArtifacts Available
Research Papers
George Mathew North Carolina State University, Kathryn Stolee North Carolina State University
DOI
20:10
10m
Paper
Automating the Removal of Obsolete TODO Comments
Research Papers
Zhipeng Gao Monash University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, David Lo Singapore Management University, John Grundy Monash University, Thomas Zimmermann Microsoft Research
DOI
20:20
10m
Paper
Generating Question Titles for Stack Overflow from Mined Code Snippets
Journal First
Zhipeng Gao Monash University, Xin Xia Huawei Technologies, John Grundy Monash University, David Lo Singapore Management University, Yuan-Fang Li Monash University
20:30
30m
Live Q&A
Q&A (Analytics & Software Evolution—Code Recommendation)
Research Papers