Learning to Rank for Question-Oriented Software Text Retrieval

Abstract—Question-oriented text retrieval, aka natural language-based text retrieval, has been widely used in software engineering. Earlier work has concluded that questions with the same keywords but different interrogatives (such as how, what) should result in different answers. But what is the difference? How to identify the right answers to a question? In this paper, we propose to investigate the “answer style ” of software questions with different interrogatives. Towards this end, we build classifiers in a software text repository and propose a re-ranking approach to refine search results. The classifiers are trained by over 16,000 answers from the StackOverflow forum. Each answer is labeled accurately by its question’s explicit or implicit interrogatives. We have evaluated the performance of our classifiers and the refine-ment of our re-ranking approach in software text retrieval. Our approach results in 13.1 % and 12.6 % respectively improvement with respect to text retrieval criteri