research-article

Synonym suggestion for tags on stack overflow

Authors:

Stefanie Beyer,

Martin PinzgerAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 94 - 103

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The amount of diverse tags used to classify posts on Stack Overflow increased in the last years to more than 38,000 tags. Many of these tags have the same or similar meaning. Stack Overflow provides an approach to reduce the amount of tags by allowing privileged users to manually create synonyms. However, currently exist only 2,765 synonym-pairs on Stack Overflow that is quite low compared to the total number of tags.

To comprehend how synonym-pairs are built, we manually analyzed the tags and how the synonyms could be created automatically. Based on our findings, we then present TSST, a tag synonym suggestion tool, that outputs a ranked list of possible synonyms for each input tag.

We first evaluated TSST with the 2,765 approved synonym-pairs of Stack Overflow. For 88.4% of the tags TSST finds the correct synonyms, for 72.2% the correct synonym is within the top 10 suggestions. In addition, we applied TSST to 10 randomly selected Android related tags and evaluated the suggested synonyms with 20 Android app developers in an online survey. Overall, in 80% of their ratings, developers found an adequate synonym suggested by TSST.

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Cited By

Dietrich JLuczak-Roesch MDalefield EStorey MAdams BHaiduc S(2019)Man vs machineProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2019.00041(205-209)Online publication date: 26-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSR.2019.00041
Liu JZhou PYang ZLiu XGrundy J(2018)FastTagRecAutomated Software Engineering10.5555/3288647.328871125:4(675-701)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3288647.3288711
Villanes IAscate SGomes JDias-Neto AMaldonado JFerrari FKulesza UUchôa Conte T(2017)What are Software Engineers asking about Android Testing on Stack Overflow?Proceedings of the XXXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3131151.3131157(104-113)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131151.3131157
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Synonym suggestion for tags on stack overflow
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Natural language processing
  2. Machine learning
    1. Learning paradigms
      1. Supervised learning
        Supervised learning by classification
    2. Machine learning approaches
      1. Classification and regression trees
2. Software and its engineering

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

May 2015

325 pages

General Chair:
Andrea De Lucia
University of Salerno, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Christian Bird
Microsoft Research
,
Rocco Oliveto
University of Molise, Italy

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ACM
SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS\DATC
TCSE

ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Cited By

Dietrich JLuczak-Roesch MDalefield EStorey MAdams BHaiduc S(2019)Man vs machineProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2019.00041(205-209)Online publication date: 26-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSR.2019.00041
Liu JZhou PYang ZLiu XGrundy J(2018)FastTagRecAutomated Software Engineering10.5555/3288647.328871125:4(675-701)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3288647.3288711
Villanes IAscate SGomes JDias-Neto AMaldonado JFerrari FKulesza UUchôa Conte T(2017)What are Software Engineers asking about Android Testing on Stack Overflow?Proceedings of the XXXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3131151.3131157(104-113)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3131151.3131157
Shao BYan JZhang ZGu NLi SLu TLi L(2017)Recommending Answerers for Stack Overflow with LDA ModelProceedings of the 12th Chinese Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3127404.3127426(80-86)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3127404.3127426
Chen CXing ZWang XUchitel SOrso ARobillard M(2017)Unsupervised software-specific morphological forms inference from informal discussionsProceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2017.48(450-461)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2017.48
Beyer SPinzger MKim MRobbes RBird C(2016)Grouping android tag synonyms on stack overflowProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/2901739.2901750(430-440)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2901739.2901750

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