An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper investigates unresolved questions on Stack Overflow where no answers are accepted, analyzing their characteristics and proposing a prediction model that forecasts whether the best answer will remain unaccepted with high accuracy.

Contribution

It provides an exploratory analysis of unresolved questions and introduces a prediction model based on user behavior, topics, and question popularity to identify potential unresolved issues.

Findings

Model predicts unresolved questions with 78.70% precision.

Model achieves 76.10% recall in prediction.

Analysis reveals key factors influencing answer acceptance.

Abstract

For a significant number of questions at Stack Overflow, none of the posted answers were accepted as solutions. Acceptance of an answer indicates that the answer actually solves the discussed problem in the question, and the question is answered sufficiently. In this paper, we investigate 3,956 such unresolved questions using an exploratory study where we analyze four important aspects of those questions, their answers and the corresponding users that partially explain the observed scenario. We then propose a prediction model by employing five metrics related to user behaviour, topics and popularity of question, which predicts if the best answer for a question at Stack Overflow might remain unaccepted or not. Experiments using 8,057 questions show that the model can predict unresolved questions with 78.70% precision and 76.10% recall.