Extracting API Tips from Developer Question and Answer Websites

Abstract

The success of question and answer (Q&A) websites attracts massive user-generated content for using and learning APIs, which easily leads to information overload: many questions for APIs have a large number of answers containing useful and irrelevant information, and cannot all be consumed by developers. In this work, we develop DeepTip, a novel deep learning-based approach using different Convolutional Neural Network architectures, to extract short practical and useful tips from developer answers. Our extensive empirical experiments prove that DeepTip can extract useful tips from a large corpus of answers to questions with high precision (i.e., avg. 0.854) and coverage (i.e., 0.94), and it outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines by up to 56.7% and 162%, respectively, in terms of Precision. Furthermore, qualitatively, a user study is conducted with real Stack Overflow users and its results confirm that tip extraction is useful and our approach generates high-quality tips.