Dublin City University at QA@CLEF 2008

We describe our participation in Multilingual Question Answering at CLEF 2008 using German and English as our source and target languages respectively. The system was built using UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) as underlying framework

Finding Relevant Answers in Software Forums

Abstract—Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containin

From Query to Usable Code: An Analysis of Stack Overflow Code Snippets

Enriched by natural language texts, Stack Overflow code snippets are an invaluable code-centric knowledge base of small units of source code. Besides being useful for software developers, these annotated snippets can potentially serve as the basis for automated tools that provide working code solutions to specific natural language queries. With the goal of developing automated tools with the Stack Overflow snippets and surrounding text, this paper investigates the following questions: (1) How usable are the Stack Overflow code snippets? and (2) When using text search engines for matching on the natural language questions and answers around the snippets, what percentage of the top results contain usable code snippets? A total of 3M code snippets are analyzed across four languages: C\#, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Python and JavaScript proved to be the languages for which the most code snippets are usable. Conversely, Java and C\# proved to be the languages with the lowest usability rate. Further qualitative analysis on usable Python snippets shows the characteristics of the answers that solve the original question. Finally, we use Google search to investigate the alignment of usability and the natural language annotations around code snippets, and explore how to make snippets in Stack Overflow an adequate base for future automatic program generation.Comment: 13th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 11 page