ICSE 2023 (series) / ICPC 2023 (series) / Journal First /
A Study of Update Request Comments in Stack Overflow Answer Posts
Mon 15 May 2023 10:04 - 10:13 at Meeting Room 106 - Conference Introductions / MIP Talk / Documentation and Stack Overflow Chair(s): Christoph Treude, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla
Comments play an important role in updating Stack Overflow (SO) posts. They are used to point out a problem (e.g., obsolete answer and buggy code) in a SO answer or ask for more details about a proposed answer. We refer to this type of comment as update request comments (URCs), which may trigger an update to the answer post and thus improve its quality. In this study, we manually analyze a set of 384 sampled SO answer posts and their associated 1,221 comments to investigate the prevalence of URCs and how URCs are addressed. We find that around half of the analyzed comments are URCs. While 55.3% of URCs are addressed within 24 hours, 36.5% of URCs remain unaddressed after a year. Moreover, we find that the current community-vote mechanism could not differentiate URCs from non-URCs. Thus many URCs might not be aware by users who can address the issue or improve the answer quality. As a first step to enhance the awareness of URCs and support future research on URCs, we investigate the feasibility of URC detection by proposing a set of features extracted from different aspects of SO comments and using them to build supervised classifiers that can automatically identify URCs. Our experiments on 377 and 289 comments posted on answers to JavaScript and Python questions show that the proposed URC classifier can achieve an accuracy of 90% and an AUC of 0.96, on average.
Mon 15 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
Mon 15 May
Displayed time zone: Hobart change
09:00 - 10:30 | Conference Introductions / MIP Talk / Documentation and Stack OverflowDiscussion / Research / Opening / Journal First / MIP Talk at Meeting Room 106 Chair(s): Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, Akhila Sri Manasa Venigalla IIT Tirupati | ||
09:00 15mDay opening | Conference Opening Opening G: Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, P: Raula Gaikovina Kula Nara Institute of Science and Technology, P: Bonita Sharif University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA | ||
09:15 40mTalk | MIP Talk on ICPC 2013 Paper titled "Automatic generation of natural language summaries for Java classes" MIP Talk Laura Moreno CQSE America, Jairo Aponte Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Giriprasad Sridhara IBM Research Labs, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas, Lori Pollock University of Delaware, USA, K. Vijay-Shanker | ||
09:55 9mFull-paper | QTC4SO: Automatic Question Title Completion for Stack Overflow Research Yanlin Zhou School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University, ShaoYu Yang School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University, Xiang Chen Nantong University, Zichen Zhang School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University, Jiahua Pei School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University Pre-print | ||
10:04 9mTalk | A Study of Update Request Comments in Stack Overflow Answer Posts Journal First Mohammad Sadegh Sheikhaei School of Computing, Queen's University, Yuan Tian Queens University, Kingston, Canada, Shaowei Wang University of Manitoba Link to publication | ||
10:13 9mTalk | Machine Translation-based Fine-grained Comments Generation for Solidity Smart Contracts Journal First Chaochen Shi Deakin University, Yong Xiang Deakin University, Jiangshan Yu Monash University, Keshav Sood Deakin University, Longxiang Gao Qilu University of Technology | ||
10:22 8mPanel | Discussion 1 Discussion |