Gottipati, Swapna, David Lo, and Jing Jiang. "Finding relevant answers in software forums." 2011 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2011). IEEE, 2011.

This paper addresses the challenge of finding relevant answers in online software forums, where traditional search engines struggle due to the vast number of posts and technical jargon. It introduces a semantic search engine framework that processes forum threads and uses inferred semantic tags to identify relevant answers more effectively. Analyzing 6,068 posts from three software forums, the framework achieved an average precision, recall, and F-measure of 67%, 71%, and 69%, respectively. A user-assisted study demonstrated that the framework significantly improves retrieval accuracy, increasing mean average precision from 17% to 71% and achieving a Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) @1 score of 91.2%.