Mining Successful Answers in Stack Overflow

Recent research has shown that drivers of success in online question answering encompass presentation quality as well as temporal and social aspects. Yet, we argue that also the emotional style of a technical contribution influences its perceived quality. In this paper, we investigate how Stack Overflow users can increase the chance of getting their answer accepted. We focus on actionable factors that can be acted upon by users when writing an answer and making comments. We found evidence that factors related to information presentation, time and affect all have an impact on the success of answers.

I. Introduction

The enormous success of Stack Overflow (SO) provides data scientists with a huge amount of data about online question answering (QA). Our investigation aims to provide guidelines for writing high-quality contributions and inform the design of tools that support effective knowledge sharing. In this paper, we investigate how an information provider can increase the chance of getting his answer accepted in SO. In particular, we focus on actionable factors that can be acted upon by community members when contributing to answering a question. Hence, our first research question is formulated as follows: