Learning To Rank For Question-Oriented Software Text Retrieval

Question-oriented text retrieval, aka natural language-based text retrieval, has been widely used in software engineering. Earlier work has concluded that questions with the same keywords but different interrogatives (such as how, what) should result in different answers. But what is the difference? How to identify the right answers to a question? In this paper, we propose to investigate the "answer style" of software questions with different interrogatives. Towards this end, we build classifiers in a software text repository and propose a re-ranking approach to refine search results. The classifiers are trained by over 16,000 answers from the StackOverflow forum. Each answer is labeled accurately by its question's explicit or implicit interrogatives. We have evaluated the performance of our classifiers and the refinement of our re-ranking approach in software text retrieval. Our approach results in 13.1% and 12.6% respectively improvement with respect to text retrieval criteria nDCG@1 and nDCG@10 compared to the baseline. We also apply our approach to FAQs of 7 open source projects and show 13.2% improvement with respect to nDCG@1. The results of our experiments suggest that our approach could find answers to FAQs more precisely.