MSR 2020
Mon 29 - Tue 30 June 2020
co-located with ICSE 2020
Tue 30 Jun 2020 10:52 - 11:00 at MSR:Zoom2 - Apps & Bots Chair(s): Ivano Malavolta

Software chatbots are flourishing these days in different domains and fields due to their benefits in saving costs, time, and effort. This is due to their capability of allowing users to communicate and control different services easily through natural language. The chatbot development requires special expertise (e.g., machine learning and conversation design) that differ from the traditional software systems. However, to date, the challenges that chatbot developers face remain fuzzy and unclear as most of the studies focused on proposing chatbots to perform particular tasks.

Therefore, in this paper, we investigate Q&A website to provide insights on the topics that chatbot developers are interested and the challenges they face. In particular, we leverage topic modeling to understand the topics that are being discussed by chatbot developers on Stack Overflow. Then, we examine the popularity and difficulty of those topics. Our results show that most of the chatbot developers are using Stack Overflow to ask about implementation guidelines. The developers discuss 12 chatbot topics (e.g., User Interface) that are grouped into five categories. Most of the posts belong to chatbot development, integration, and the natural language understanding model categories. On the other hand, we find that developers consider the posts of building and integrating chatbots topics more helpful compared to other topics. Moreover, they are facing challenges in the training of the chatbot’s model. We believe that our study guides future research to propose techniques and tools to help the community at its early stages to overcome the most popular and difficult topics that practitioners face when developing chatbots.

Tue 30 Jun

Displayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change

10:30 - 11:00
Apps & BotsTechnical Papers / Registered Reports / Keynote / MSR Awards / FOSS Award / Education / Data Showcase / Mining Challenge / MSR Challenge Proposals / Ask Me Anything at MSR:Zoom2
Chair(s): Ivano Malavolta Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Q/A & Discussion of Session Papers over Zoom (Joining info available on Slack)

10:30
7m
Live Q&A
AndroZooOpen: Collecting Large-scale Open Source Android Apps for the Research CommunityMSR - Data Showcase
Data Showcase
A: Pei Liu , A: Li Li Monash University, Australia, A: Yanjie Zhao , A: Xiaoyu Sun , A: John Grundy Monash University
Media Attached
10:37
7m
Live Q&A
Hall-of-Apps: The Top Android Apps Metadata ArchiveMSR - Data Showcase
Data Showcase
Media Attached
10:45
7m
Live Q&A
Detecting and Characterizing Bots that Commit CodeMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Tapajit Dey , Sara Mousavi , Eduardo Ponce University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Tanner Fry , Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University, Anna Filippova , Audris Mockus University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Pre-print Media Attached
10:52
7m
Live Q&A
Challenges in Chatbot Development: A Study of Stack Overflow PostsMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Ahmad Abdellatif Concordia University, Diego Costa Concordia University, Canada, Khaled Badran Concordia University, Rabe Abdalkareem Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, Emad Shihab Concordia University
Pre-print Media Attached