Answering questions about unanswered questions of Stack Overflow
Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2013 papers
Abstract
Community-based question answering services accumulate large volumes of knowledge through the voluntary services of people across the globe. Stack Overflow is an example of such a service that targets developers and software engineers. In general, questions in Stack Overflow are answered in a very short time. However, we found that the number of unanswered questions has increased significantly in the past two years. Understanding why questions remain unanswered can help information seekers improve the quality of their questions, increase their chances of getting answers, and better decide when to use Stack Overflow services. In this paper, we mine data on unanswered questions from Stack Overflow. We then conduct a qualitative study to categorize unanswered questions, which reveals characteristics that would be difficult to find otherwise. Finally, we conduct an experiment to determine whether we can predict how long a question will remain unanswered in Stack Overflow.
Related Papers
- → Visual Search and the Collapse of Categorization.(2005)35 cited
- → The neurobiology of categorization(2010)4 cited
- → Two categorization patterns in idiom semantics(2016)1 cited
- On the Reasons for Cognitive Differences During Categorization(2009)
- → Is one object enough? Diagnosticity of single objects for fast scene categorization(2022)