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G-Finder: routing programming questions closer to the experts

Published: 17 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Programming forums are becoming the primary tools for programmers to find answers for their programming problems. Our empirical study of popular programming forums shows that the forum users experience long waiting period for answers and a small number of experts are often overloaded with questions. To improve the usage experience, we have designed and implemented G-Finder, both an algorithm and a tool that makes intelligent routing decisions as to which participant is the expert for answering a particular programming question. Our main approach is to leverage the source code information of the software systems that forums are dedicated to, and discover latent relationships between forums users. Our algorithms construct the concept networks and the user networks from the program source and the forum data.We use programming questions to dynamically integrate these two networks and present an adaptive ranking of the potential experts. Our evaluation of G-Finder, using the data from three large programming forums, takes a retrospective view to check if G-Finder can correctly predict the experts who provided answers to programming questions. The evaluation results show that G-Finder improves the prediction precision by 25% to 74%, compared to related approaches.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
    October 2010
    984 pages
    ISBN:9781450302036
    DOI:10.1145/1869459
    • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 45, Issue 10
      OOPSLA '10
      October 2010
      957 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/1932682
      Issue’s Table of Contents
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    Publication History

    Published: 17 October 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. expert search
    2. programming forums
    3. social networks

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    View all
    • (2024)Multi-dimensional feature fusion-based expert recommendation in community question answeringThe Electronic Library10.1108/EL-01-2024-001142:6(996-1016)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
    • (2017)Multiview Physician-Specific Attributes Fusion for Health SeekingIEEE Transactions on Cybernetics10.1109/TCYB.2016.257759047:11(3680-3691)Online publication date: Nov-2017
    • (2015)Detecting high-quality posts in community question answering sitesInformation Sciences: an International Journal10.1016/j.ins.2014.12.038302:C(70-82)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
    • (2014)MaCProceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/2661829.2661880(11-20)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2014
    • (2013)Question routing to user communitiesProceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/2505515.2505669(2357-2362)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
    • (2012)Facing up to the inequality of crowdsourced API documentationACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2088883.208889237:1(1-9)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2012
    • (2012)A deniable and efficient question and answer service over ad hoc social networksInformation Retrieval10.1007/s10791-012-9185-015:3-4(296-331)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
    • (2015)Metrics and Algorithms for Routing Questions to User CommunitiesACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/272470633:3(1-29)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
    • (2015)Detecting high-quality posts in community question answering sitesInformation Sciences: an International Journal10.1016/j.ins.2014.12.038302:C(70-82)Online publication date: 1-May-2015
    • (2013)Question routing to user communitiesProceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/2505515.2505669(2357-2362)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013

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