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Detecting Duplicate Posts in Programming QA Communities via Latent Semantics and Association Rules

Authors:

Wei Emma Zhang,

Ermyas AbebeAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

Pages 1221 - 1229

https://doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052701

Published: 03 April 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Programming community-based question-answering (PCQA) websites such as Stack Overflow enable programmers to find working solutions to their questions. Despite detailed posting guidelines, duplicate questions that have been answered are frequently created. To tackle this problem, Stack Overflow provides a mechanism for reputable users to manually mark duplicate questions. This is a laborious effort, and leads to many duplicate questions remain undetected. Existing duplicate detection methodologies from traditional community based question-answering (CQA) websites are difficult to be adopted directly to PCQA, as PCQA posts often contain source code which is linguistically very different from natural languages. In this paper, we propose a methodology designed for the PCQA domain to detect duplicate questions. We model the detection as a classification problem over question pairs. To extract features for question pairs, our methodology leverages continuous word vectors from the deep learning literature, topic model features and phrases pairs that co-occur frequently in duplicate questions mined using machine translation systems. These features capture semantic similarities between questions and produce a strong performance for duplicate detection. Experiments on a range of real-world datasets demonstrate that our method works very well; in some cases over 30% improvement compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks. As a product of one of the proposed features, the association score feature, we have mined a set of associated phrases from duplicate questions on Stack Overflow and open the dataset to the public.

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Cited By

Lima MSteinmacher IFord DVorreuter GGonçalves LConte TGadelha B(2025)How are discussions linked? A link analysis study on GitHub DiscussionsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112196219(112196)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112196
Skenderi EHuhtamäki JLaaksonen SStefanidis K(2024)INCEPT: A Framework for Duplicate Posts Classification with Combined Text RepresentationsACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/367732218:3(1-24)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677322
Wu XLi HYoshioka NWashizaki HKhomh F(2024)Refining GPT-3 Embeddings with a Siamese Structure for Technical Post Duplicate Detection2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00019(114-125)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00019
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Detecting Duplicate Posts in Programming QA Communities via Latent Semantics and Association Rules
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Natural language processing
      1. Information extraction
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Retrieval tasks and goals
      1. Near-duplicate and plagiarism detection
      2. Question answering
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining
      1. Association rules

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

WWW '17: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web

April 2017

1678 pages

ISBN:9781450349130

General Chairs:
Rick Barrett
W3Events
,
Rick Cummings
Murdoch University
,
Program Chairs:
Eugene Agichtein
Emory University
,
Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Google Research

Copyright © 2017 Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).

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IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

Publication History

Published: 03 April 2017

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WWW '17

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IW3C2

WWW '17: 26th International World Wide Web Conference

April 3 - 7, 2017

Perth, Australia

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WWW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 164 of 966 submissions, 17%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

Lima MSteinmacher IFord DVorreuter GGonçalves LConte TGadelha B(2025)How are discussions linked? A link analysis study on GitHub DiscussionsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112196219(112196)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112196
Skenderi EHuhtamäki JLaaksonen SStefanidis K(2024)INCEPT: A Framework for Duplicate Posts Classification with Combined Text RepresentationsACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/367732218:3(1-24)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677322
Wu XLi HYoshioka NWashizaki HKhomh F(2024)Refining GPT-3 Embeddings with a Siamese Structure for Technical Post Duplicate Detection2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00019(114-125)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER60148.2024.00019
Gao ZXia XLo DGrundy JZhang XXing Z(2023)I Know What You Are Searching for: Code Snippet Recommendation from Stack Overflow PostsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/355015032:3(1-42)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550150
Jiang HLi YGuo SLi XZhang TLi HChen R(2023)DupHunter: Detecting Duplicate Pull Requests in Fork-Based DevelopmentIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.323594249:4(2920-2940)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3235942
Alhadi AMohamed AAbdul Jalil MWan Yussof WDeraman AMohemad R(2023)UMTCSF: A Graduate Forum Platform Utilizing an Ensemble Similarity Model2023 International Conference on Informatics Engineering, Science & Technology (INCITEST)10.1109/INCITEST59455.2023.10397021(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/INCITEST59455.2023.10397021
Wu JSun YZhang JZhou YHuang G(2023)A Programming Language Learning Service by Linking Stack Overflow with Textbooks2023 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)10.1109/ICWS60048.2023.00043(234-245)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS60048.2023.00043
Kamienski AHindle ABezemer C(2023)Analyzing Techniques for Duplicate Question Detection on Q&A Websites for Game DevelopersEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-022-10256-w28:1Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-022-10256-w
Gómez JVázquez P(2022)An Empirical Evaluation of Document Embeddings and Similarity Metrics for Scientific ArticlesApplied Sciences10.3390/app1211566412:11(5664)Online publication date: 2-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/app12115664
Huang YXu FZhou HChen XZhou XWang TRastogi ATufano RBavota GArnaoudova VHaiduc S(2022)Towards exploring the code reuse from stack overflow during software developmentProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1145/3524610.3527923(548-559)Online publication date: 16-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524610.3527923
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