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An empirical study on developer interactions in StackOverflow
SAC 2013: Proceedings of the 28th annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing: Coimbra, Portugal, 18-22 March 2013
  • Shaowei WANG, Singapore Management University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Lingxiao JIANG, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
3-2013
Abstract

StackOverflow provides a popular platform where developers post and answer questions. Recently, Treude et al. manually label 385 questions in StackOverflow and group them into 10 categories based on their contents. They also analyze how tags are used in StackOverflow. In this study, we extend their work to obtain a deeper understanding on how developers interact with one another on such a question and answer web site. First, we analyze the distributions of developers who ask and answer questions. We also investigate if there is a segregation of the StackOverflow community into questioners and answerers. We also perform automated text mining to find the various kinds of topics asked by developers. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a well known topic modeling approach, to analyze the contents of tens of thousands of questions and answers, and produce five topics. Our topic modeling strategy provides an alternative perspective different from that of Treude et al. for categorizing StackOverflow questions. Each question can now be categorized into several topics with different probabilities, and the learned topic model could automatically assign a new question to several categories with varying probabilities. Last but not least, we show the distributions of questions and developers belonging to various topics generated by LDA.

Keywords
  • developer forum mining,
  • latent dirichlet allocation (LDA),
  • developer interaction mining
ISBN
9781450316569
Identifier
10.1145/2480362.2480557
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480557
Citation Information
Shaowei WANG, David LO and Lingxiao JIANG. "An empirical study on developer interactions in StackOverflow" SAC 2013: Proceedings of the 28th annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing: Coimbra, Portugal, 18-22 March 2013 (2013) p. 1019 - 1024
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/182/