Experiences Building an Answer Bot for Gitter

Software developers use modern chat platforms to communicate about the status of a project and to coordinate development and release efforts, among other things. Developers also use chat platforms to ask technical questions to other developers. While some questions are project-specific and require an experienced developer familiar with the system to answer, many questions are rather general and may have been already answered by other developers on platforms such as the Q&A site StackOverflow. In this paper, we present GitterAns, a bot that can automatically detect when a developer asks a technical question in a chat and leverages the information present in Q&A forums to provide the developer with possible answers to their question. The results of a preliminary study indicate promising results, with GitterAns achieving an accuracy of 0.78 in identifying technical questions.