TBIL: A Tagging-Based Approach to Identity Linkage Across Software Communities

Nowadays, developers can be involved in several software developer communities like StackOverflow and Github. Meanwhile, accounts from different communities are usually less connected. Linking these accounts, which is called identity linkage, is a prerequisite of many interesting studies such as investigating activities of one developer in two or more communities. Many researches have been performed on social networks, but very few of them can be adapted to software communities, as information of users provided in these communities has a huge difference to that in social networks. We tackle with the problem by introducing TBIL, a novel tagging-based approach to identity linkage among software communities. The essential idea of this approach is to employ skills (measured by tags), usernames and concerned topics of developers as hints, and to use a decision tree-based algorithm and another heuristic greedy matching algorithm to link user identities. We measure the effectiveness of TBIL on two well-known software communities, i.e., StackOverflow and Github. The results show that our method is feasible and practical in linking developer identities. In particular, the F-Score of our method is 0.15 higher than previous identity linkage methods in software communities.