Towards Leveraging LLMs for Reducing Open Source Onboarding Information Overload
Consistent, diverse, and quality contributions are essential to the sustainability of the open source community. Therefore, it is important that there is infrastructure for effectively on-boarding and retaining diverse newcomers to open source software projects. Most often, open source projects rely on onboarding documentation to support newcomers in making their first contributions. Unfortunately, prior studies suggest that information overload from available documentation, along with the predominantly monolingual nature of repositories, can have negative effects on the newcomer experiences and onboarding process. This, coupled with the effort involved in creating and maintaining onboarding documentation, suggest a need for support in creating more accessible documentation. Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in providing text transformation support in other domains, and even shown promise in simplifying or generating other kinds of computing artifacts, such as source code and technical documentation. We contend that LLMs can also help make software on-boarding documentation more accessible, thereby reducing the potential for information overload. Using ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 Turbo) and Gemini Pro as case studies, we assessed the effectiveness of LLMs for simplifying software on-boarding documentation, one method for reducing information overload. We discuss a broader vision for using LLMs to support the creation of more accessible documentation and outline future research directions toward this vision.
Tue 29 OctDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
13:30 - 15:00 | LLM for SE 1Research Papers / NIER Track / Tool Demonstrations / Journal-first Papers at Camellia Chair(s): Chengcheng Wan East China Normal University | ||
13:30 15mTalk | How Effective Do Code Language Models Understand Poor-Readability Code? Research Papers Chao Hu Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Yitian Chai School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Hao Zhou Pattern, Recognition Center, WeChat, Tencent, Fandong Meng WeChat AI, Tencent, Jie Zhou Tencent, Xiaodong Gu Shanghai Jiao Tong University | ||
13:45 15mTalk | An Empirical Study to Evaluate AIGC Detectors on Code Content Research Papers Jian Wang Nanyang Technological University, Shangqing Liu Nanyang Technological University, Xiaofei Xie Singapore Management University, Yi Li Nanyang Technological University Pre-print | ||
14:00 15mTalk | Distilled GPT for source code summarization Journal-first Papers | ||
14:15 15mTalk | Leveraging Large Language Model to Assist Detecting Rust Code Comment Inconsistency Research Papers Zhang Yichi , Zixi Liu Nanjing University, Yang Feng Nanjing University, Baowen Xu Nanjing University | ||
14:30 10mTalk | LLM-Based Java Concurrent Program to ArkTS Converter Tool Demonstrations Runlin Liu Beihang University, Yuhang Lin Zhejiang University, Yunge Hu Beihang University, Zhe Zhang Beihang University, Xiang Gao Beihang University | ||
14:40 10mTalk | Towards Leveraging LLMs for Reducing Open Source Onboarding Information Overload NIER Track | ||
14:50 10mTalk | CoDefeater: Using LLMs To Find Defeaters in Assurance Cases NIER Track Usman Gohar Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Michael Hunter Iowa State University, Robyn Lutz Iowa State University, Myra Cohen Iowa State University |