Stack Overflow is a popular platform for developers to seek solutions to programming-related problems. However, prior studies identified that developers may suffer from the redundant, useless, and incomplete information retrieved by the Stack Overflow search engine. To help developers better utilize the Stack Overflow knowledge, researchers proposed tools to summarize answers to a Stack Overflow question. However, existing tools use hand-craft features to assess the usefulness of each answer sentence and fail to remove semantically redundant information in the result. Besides, existing tools only focus on a certain programming language and cannot retrieve up-to-date new posted knowledge from Stack Overflow. In this paper, we propose TECHSUMBOT, an automatic answer summary generation tool for a technical problem. Given a question, TECHSUMBOT first retrieves answers using the Stack Overflow search engine, then TECHSUMBOT 1) ranks each answers sentence based on the sentence’s usefulness, 2) estimates the centrality of each sentence to all candidates, and 3) removes the semantic redundant information. Finally, TECHSUMBOT returns the top 5 ranked answer sentences as the answer summary. We implement TECHSUMBOT in the form of a search engine website. To evaluate TECHSUMBOT in both automatic and manual manners, we construct the first Stack Overflow multi-answer summarization benchmark and design a user study to assess the effectiveness of TECHSUMBOT and state-of-the-art baselines from the NLP and SE domains. Both results indicate that the summaries generated by TECHSUMBOT are more diverse, useful, and similar to the ground truth summaries.

Video Link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ozuJOp_vILM Replication Package: https://github.com/TechSumBot/TechSumBot