A Content-Based Model for Tag Recommendation in Software Information Sites

Abstract

Abstract Developers use software information sites such as Stack Overflow to get and give information on various subjects. These sites allow developers to label content with tags as a short description. Tags, then, are used to describe, categorize and search the posted content. However, tags might be noisy, and postings may become poorly categorized since people tag a posting based on their knowledge of its content and other existing tags. To keep the content well organized, tag recommendation systems can help users by suggesting appropriate tags for their posted content. In this paper, we propose a tag recommendation scheme that uses the textual content of already tagged postings to recommend suitable tags for newly posted content. Our approach combines multi-label classification and textual similarity techniques to improve the performance of tag recommendation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme on 11 software information sites from the Stack Exchange network. The results show a significant improvement over TagCombine, TagMulRec and FastTagRec, which are well-known tag recommendation systems. On average, the proposed model outperforms TagCombine, TagMulRec and FastTagRec by 26.2, 15.9 and 13.8% in terms of Recall@5 and by 16.9, 12.4 and 9.4% in terms of Recall@10, respectively.