Automatic classification of software related microblogs

Abstract—Millions of people, including those in the soft-ware engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. We extract features from the textual content of the microblogs and the titles of any URLs mentioned in the mi-croblogs. These features are then used to learn a discriminative model used in classifying relevant and irrelevant microblogs. We show that our trained model can achieve a promising classification performance. I