# An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Question-Answering Process on Developer Forums

Source: [An Empirical Study on the Characteristics of Question-Answering Process on Developer Forums](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa665c1e209131cea0fd51>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:48:29.028Z

Authors: Yi Li, Shaohua Wang, Tien N. Nguyen, Son Van Nguyen, Xinyue Ye, Yan Wang

Published: 2019-09-05T20:11:41.000Z

## Abstract

Developer forums are one of the most popular and useful Q&A websites on API usages. The analysis of API forums can be a critical resource for the automated question and answer approaches. In this paper, we empirically study three API forums including Twitter, eBay, and AdWords, to investigate the characteristics of question-answering process. We observe that +60% of the posts on all three forums were answered by providing API method names or documentation. +85% of the questions were answered by API development teams and the answers from API development teams drew fewer follow-up questions. Our results provide empirical evidences for us in a future work to build automated solutions to answer developer questions on API forums.

## Recorded benchmark results

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## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02616>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02616.pdf>)