# Detecting Speech Act Types in Developer Question/Answer Conversations During Bug Repair

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05130/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Beyond Code Generation: An Observational Study of ChatGPT Usage in Software Engineering Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14901/) (2024)
- [ISEEQ: Information Seeking Question Generation using Dynamic Meta-Information Retrieval and Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07622/) (2021)
- [The StudyChat Dataset: Analyzing Student Dialogues With ChatGPT in an Artificial Intelligence Course](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07928/) (2025)
- [A Neural Question Answering System for Basic Questions about Subroutines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03999/) (2021)
- [Learning to Describe Solutions for Bug Reports Based on Developer Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04353/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper targets the problem of speech act detection in conversations about bug repair. We conduct a "Wizard of Oz" experiment with 30 professional programmers, in which the programmers fix bugs for two hours, and use a simulated virtual assistant for help. Then, we use an open coding manual annotation procedure to identify the speech act types in the conversations. Finally, we train and evaluate a supervised learning algorithm to automatically detect the speech act types in the conversations. In 30 two-hour conversations, we made 2459 annotations and uncovered 26 speech act types. Our automated detection achieved 69% precision and 50% recall. The key application of this work is to advance the state of the art for virtual assistants in software engineering. Virtual assistant technology is growing rapidly, though applications in software engineering are behind those in other areas, largely due to a lack of relevant data and experiments. This paper targets this problem in the area of developer Q/A conversations about bug repair.