Semi-Automatically Extracting FAQs to Improve Accessibility of Software Development Knowledge

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automatic method for extracting high-quality FAQs from software development discussion sources, enhancing knowledge accessibility with minimal manual effort.

Contribution

It combines text mining and NLP techniques to automatically generate FAQs from mailing lists and forums, reducing manual documentation costs.

Findings

Successfully extracted high-quality FAQs from mailing lists.

Survey indicates developers find the FAQs useful and relevant.

Method improves accessibility of software development knowledge.

Abstract

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) are a popular way to document software development knowledge. As creating such documents is expensive, this paper presents an approach for automatically extracting FAQs from sources of software development discussion, such as mailing lists and Internet forums, by combining techniques of text mining and natural language processing. We apply the approach to popular mailing lists and carry out a survey among software developers to show that it is able to extract high-quality FAQs that may be further improved by experts.