Abstract: When software developers need help with their development or maintenance
task, they seek information from other developers using question and answer forums.
Developers often search the forum by submitting queries, which results in a ranked
listing of posts displayed as question title and excerpt from the question description.
This thesis presents a technique to automatically extract the questioner’s softwarerelated
goals and symptoms from the question description. We show how explicit
identification of goal and symptom information can help developers determine relevance
of search results. Classification of natural language text in forums could also be useful
to improve forum mining techniques for other purposes.
