Classifying stack overflow posts on API issues
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The design and maintenance of APIs are complex tasks due to the constantly changing requirements of its users. Despite the efforts of its designers, APIs may suffer from a number of issues (such as incomplete or erroneous documentation, poor performance, and backward incompatibility). To maintain a healthy client base, API designers must learn these issues to fix them. Question answering sites, such as Stack Overflow (SO), has become a popular place for discussing API issues. These posts about API issues are invaluable to API designers, not only because they can help to learn more about the problem but also because they can facilitate learning the requirements of API users. However, the unstructured nature of posts and the abundance of non-issue posts make the task of detecting SO posts concerning API issues difficult and challenging. In this paper, we first develop a supervised learning approach using a Conditional Random Field (CRF), a statistical modeling method, to identify API issue-related sentences. We use the above information together with different features of posts and experience of users to build a technique, called CAPS, that can classify SO posts concerning API issues. Evaluation of CAPS using carefully curated SO posts on three popular API types reveals that the technique outperforms all three baseline approaches we consider in this study. We also conduct studies to test the generalizability of CAPS results and to understand the effects of different sources of information on it.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it