SOCluster- Towards Intent-based Clustering of Stack Overflow Questions using Graph-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces SOCluster, a graph-based clustering tool that groups Stack Overflow questions by intent to improve question answering efficiency and reduce unanswered questions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel intent-based clustering approach for Stack Overflow questions using a graph-based method and evaluates it across multiple datasets with promising results.

Findings

Optimal clustering at 90% similarity threshold across datasets

Clusters show meaningful grouping based on intent

Evaluation metrics indicate good clustering quality

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) platform has a huge dataset of questions and answers driven by interactions between users. But the count of unanswered questions is continuously rising. This issue is common across various community Question & Answering platforms (Q&A) such as Yahoo, Quora and so on. Clustering is one of the approaches used by these communities to address this challenge. Specifically, Intent-based clustering could be leveraged to answer unanswered questions using other answered questions in the same cluster and can also improve the response time for new questions. It is here, we propose SOCluster, an approach and a tool to cluster SO questions based on intent using a graph-based clustering approach. We selected four datasets of 10k, 20k, 30k & 40k SO questions without code-snippets or images involved, and performed intent-based clustering on them. We have done a preliminary evaluation of our tool by analyzing the resultant clusters using the commonly used metrics of Silhouette coefficient, Calinkski-Harabasz Index, & Davies-Bouldin Index. We performed clustering for 8 different threshold similarity values and analyzed the intriguing trends reflected by the output clusters through the three evaluation metrics. At 90% threshold similarity, it shows the best value for the three evaluation metrics on all four datasets. The source code and tool are available for download on Github at: https://github.com/Liveitabhi/SOCluster, and the demo can be found here: https://youtu.be/uyn8ie4h3NY.