Automatic Extraction of Opinion-based Q&A from Online Developer Chats

Virtual conversational assistants designed specifically for software engineers could have a huge impact on the time it takes for software engineers to get help. Research efforts are focusing on virtual assistants that support specific software development tasks such as bug repair and pair programming. In this paper, we study the use of online chat platforms as a resource towards collecting developer opinions that could potentially help in building opinion Q&A systems, as a specialized instance of virtual assistants and chatbots for software engineers. Opinion Q&A has a stronger presence in chats than in other developer communications, thus mining them can provide a valuable resource for developers in quickly getting insight about a specific development topic (e.g., What is the best Java library for parsing JSON?). We address the problem of opinion Q&A extraction by developing automatic identification of opinion-asking questions and extraction of participants' answers from public online developer chats. We evaluate our automatic approaches on chats spanning six programming communities and two platforms. Our results show that a heuristic approach to opinion-asking questions works well (.87 precision), and a deep learning approach customized to the software domain outperforms heuristics-based, machine-learning-based and deep learning for answer extraction in community question answering.