Towards Better Answers: Automated Stack Overflow Post Updating

Abstract: Utilizing code snippets on Stack Overflow (SO) is a common practice among developers for problem-solving. Although SO code snippets serve as valuable resources, it is important to acknowledge their imperfections, reusing problematic code snippets can lead to the introduction of suboptimal or buggy code into software projects. SO comments often point out weaknesses of a post and provide valuable insights to improve the quality of answers, while SO comments are usually missed and/or ignored, leaving these problematic code snippets untouched. In this work, we first investigate the task of automatic SO posts updating based on their associated comments. We introduce a novel framework, named Soup (Stack Overflow Updator for Post) for this task. Soup addresses two key tasks: Valid Comment-Edit Prediction (VCP) and Automatic Post Updating (APU). Extensive experimental results show the promising performance of our model over a set of benchmarks. Moreover, we also performed an in-the-wild evaluation on Stack Overflow, we submitted 50 edits generated by our approach to Stack Overflow posts and 21 of them have been verified and accepted by SO maintainers, further proving the practical value of Soup.