Essential Sentences for Navigating Stack Overflow Answers
Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude

TL;DR
This paper investigates methods for identifying essential sentences in Stack Overflow answers to improve navigation, comparing four approaches through user surveys and analysis of their effectiveness in highlighting relevant contextual information.
Contribution
It introduces two new approaches for detecting essential sentences based on contextual cues and evaluates four techniques through user surveys and analysis.
Findings
No single technique effectively identifies all essential sentences.
Participants valued explanations and specific conditions over filler sentences.
Current methods need to be combined for better navigational cues.
Abstract
Stack Overflow (SO) has become an essential resource for software development. Despite its success and prevalence, navigating SO remains a challenge. Ideally, SO users could benefit from highlighted navigational cues that help them decide if an answer is relevant to their task and context. Such navigational cues could be in the form of essential sentences that help the searcher decide whether they want to read the answer or skip over it. In this paper, we compare four potential approaches for identifying essential sentences. We adopt two existing approaches and develop two new approaches based on the idea that contextual information in a sentence (e.g., "if using windows") could help identify essential sentences. We compare the four techniques using a survey of 43 participants. Our participants indicate that it is not always easy to figure out what the best solution for their specific…
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