- #How to search on a webpage stackoverflow how to#
- #How to search on a webpage stackoverflow full#
- #How to search on a webpage stackoverflow software#
- #How to search on a webpage stackoverflow code#
#How to search on a webpage stackoverflow code#
They hypothesized that an answer containing a code snippet that uses the relevant functions and is complemented with a succinct explanation is a strong candidate for a solution. In particular, they collected the programming functions that potentially implement the target programming task (the query), and then promoted the candidate answers containing such functions. To tailor the factors to Stack Overflow, they also adopted specialized ranking mechanisms well suited to software-specific documents. They made use of the traditional information retrieval (IR) metrics such as TF-IDF and asymmetric relevance. The team of researchers combined four weighted factors to rank the candidate answers.
#How to search on a webpage stackoverflow software#
CROKAGE also expanded the natural language query (task description) to include unique open source software library and function terms, carefully mined from Stack Overflow. In order to reduce the gap between the queries and solutions, the team trained a word-embedding model with FastText, using millions of Q&A threads from Stack Overflow as the training corpus. Roy’s lead with Masud as the core researcher. The team was able to build on two previous tools, RACK and NL2API, developed under Prof.
Roy’s students at the University of Saskatchewan was Masud Rahman, a PhD candidate in computer science, who had previously researched translating a programming task written in natural language into a list of relevant API classes with the help of Stack Overflow. Roy brought Rodrigo to the University of Saskatchewan as a visiting research student.
Luckily, the team did not have to start from scratch.
#How to search on a webpage stackoverflow full#
Given these obstacles, developers often have to browse dozens of documents in order to synthesize a full solution.
#How to search on a webpage stackoverflow how to#
They had a nice chat and envisioned an interesting idea which would turn into a collaborative research project: how to search Stack Overflow in such a way that results returned both relevant code snippets and a natural language explanation for them.Īs computer scientists, this group of academics knew that developers searching for solutions to coding questions are impaired by a lexical gap between their query (task description) and the information (lines of actual code) associated with the solution that they are looking for. Rodrigo reproduced both works, which resulted in a paper published at SANER’2018 in Italy.ĭuring that conference, Rodrigo was introduced to one of the Dupe authors, Professor Chanchal K. After a preliminary literature review, Rodrigo came across two previous works, DupPredictor and Dupe, that detect duplicate questions on Stack Overflow. He decided to investigate duplications in Stack Overflow under Professor Marcelo de Almeida Maia’s supervision. The backstory for this fascinating service begins in 2017, when Rodrigo Fernandes, a PhD student in computer science at The University of Uberlandia in Brazil, was looking for a thesis topic. This service takes the description of a programming task as a query and then provides relevant, comprehensive programming solutions containing both code snippets and their succinct explanations. Other times they find a great explanation about how one might solve the problem, but not the actual code.Įarlier this year, a team of computer science researchers published a paper with a novel solution to this problem: CROKAGE – the Crowd Knowledge Answer Generator. A lot of the time they find the relevant code, but don’t find a clear explanation of how to implement it. Software developers searching for answers might use natural language – “How do I insert an element array in a specific position?” – or they might choose a few important keywords relevant to the programming task at hand and use those as their query with the hope that the search engine would return the relevant solutions. Some use the internal SO search feature while others use search engines such as Google or Bing, narrowing down the search to the domain. When a developer is stuck on a coding problem, they search through this vast trove of information to see if a solution to their particular conundrum has already been offered.
Community members have contributed more than 18 million questions and 27 million answers. One of the most powerful attributes of Stack Overflow (SO) is the accumulation of developers’ knowledge over time.