Abstract-Online software forums provide a huge amount of valuable content. Developers and users often ask questions and receive answers from such forums. The availability of a vast amount of thread discussions in forums provides ample opportunities for knowledge acquisition and summarization. For a given search query, current search engines use traditional information retrieval approach to extract webpages containing relevant keywords. However, in software forums, often there are many threads containing similar keywords where each thread could contain a lot of posts as many as 1,000 or more. Manually finding relevant answers from these long threads is a painstaking task to the users. Finding relevant answers is particularly hard in software forums as: complexities of software systems cause a huge variety of issues often expressed in similar technical jargons, and software forum users are often expert internet users who often posts answers in multiple venues creating many duplicate posts, often without satisfying answers, in the world wide web.To address this problem, this paper provides a semantic search engine framework to process software threads and recover relevant answers according to user queries. Different from standard information retrieval engine, our framework infer semantic tags of posts in the software forum threads and utilize these tags to recover relevant answer posts. In our case study, we analyze 6,068 posts from three software forums. In terms of accuracy of our inferred tags, we could achieve on average an overall precision, recall and F-measure of 67%, 71%, and 69% respectively. To empirically study the benefit of our overall framework, we also conduct a user-assisted study which shows that as compared to a standard information retrieval approach, our proposed framework could increase mean average precision from 17% to 71% in retrieving relevant answers to various queries and achieve a Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) @1 score of 91.2% and nDCG@2 score of 71.6%.
In academic institutions, it is normal practice that at the end of each term, students are required to complete a questionnaire that is designed to gather students’ perceptions of the instructor and their learning experience in the course. Students’ feedback includes numerical answers to Likert scale questions and textual comments to open-ended questions. Within the textual comments given by the students are embedded suggestions. A suggestion can be explicit or implicit. Any suggestion provides useful pointers on how the instructor can further enhance the student learning experience. However, it is tedious to manually go through all the qualitative comments and extract the suggestions. In this paper, we provide an automated solution for extracting the explicit suggestions from the students’ qualitative feedback comments. The implemented solution leverages existing text mining and data visualization techniques. It comprises three stages, namely data pre-processing, explicit suggestions extraction and visualization. We evaluated our solution using student feedback comments from seven undergraduate core courses taught at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. We compared rule-based methods and statistical classifiers for extracting and summarizing the explicit suggestions. Based on our experiments, the decision tree (C5.0) works the best for extracting the suggestions from students’ qualitative feedback.
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