Automatic bi-modal question title generation for Stack Overflow with prompt learning

When drafting question posts for Stack Overflow, developers may not accurately summarize the core problems in the question titles, which can cause these questions to not get timely help. Therefore, improving the quality of question titles has attracted the wide attention of researchers. An initial study aimed to automatically generate the titles by only analyzing the code snippets in the question body. However, this study ignored the helpful information in their corresponding problem descriptions. Therefore, we propose an approach SOTitle+ by considering bi-modal information (i.e., the code snippets and the problem descriptions) in the question body. Then we formalize the title generation for different programming languages as separate but related tasks and utilize multi-task learning to solve these tasks. Later we fine-tune the pre-trained language model CodeT5 to automatically generate the titles. Unfortunately, the inconsistent inputs and optimization objectives between the pre-training task and our investigated task may make fine-tuning hard to fully explore the knowledge of the pre-trained model. To solve this issue, SOTitle+ further prompt-tunes CodeT5 with hybrid prompts (i.e., mixture of hard and soft prompts). To verify the effectiveness of SOTitle+, we construct a large-scale high-quality corpus from recent data dumps shared by Stack Overflow. Our corpus includes 179,119 high-quality question posts for six popular programming languages. Experimental results show that SOTitle+ can significantly outperform four state-of-the-art baselines in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. In addition, our ablation studies also confirm the effectiveness of component settings (such as bi-modal information, prompt learning, hybrid prompts, and multi-task learning) of SOTitle+. Our work indicates that considering bi-modal information and prompt learning in Stack Overflow title generation is a promising exploration direction.