An intelligent web-based interface for programming content detection in q&a forums

Abstract

In this demonstration, we introduce a novel web-based intelligent interface which automatically detects and highlights programming content (programming code and messages) in Q&A programming forums. We expect our interface helps enhancing visual presentation of such forum content and enhance effective participation. We solve this problem using several alternative approaches: a dictionary-based baseline method, a non-sequential Naïve Bayes classification algorithm, and Conditional Random Fields (CRF) which is a sequential labeling framework. The best results are produced by CRF method with an F1-Score of 86.9%. We also experimentally validate how robust our classifier is by testing the constructed CRF model built on a C++ forum against a Python and a Java dataset. The results indicate the classifier works quite well across different domains. To demonstrate detection results, a web-based graphical user interface is developed that accepts a user input programming forum message and processes it using trained CRF model and then displays the programming content snippets in a different font to the user.