ResearchBot: Bridging the Gap between Academic Research and Practical Programming Communities

2024-07-02

arXiv.org

AI Summary

To bridge the knowledge gap between academia and industry in software engineering, this paper introduces ResearchBot: an end-to-end academic knowledge service system for developers. It leverages large language models to understand real-world programming queries, employs query rewriting and semantic ranking to enhance retrieval precision, and invokes the CrossRef API to identify relevant scholarly publications. ResearchBot then generates structured, practice-oriented summaries and answers grounded in retrieved literature. Its novel modular architecture systematically addresses the semantic gap between the software engineering community and academic corpora—a first-of-its-kind solution. Evaluation on Stack Overflow–style questions demonstrates that ResearchBot significantly improves developers’ efficiency in accessing credible academic evidence. Crowdsourced assessment confirms high accuracy and practical utility of its generated summaries. This work establishes a reusable technical pathway and empirically validated paradigm for translating academic research into industrial practice.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Knowledge Acquisition from the Web
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Engineering
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs

Abstract

Software developers commonly rely on platforms like Stack Overflow for problem-solving and learning. However, academic research is an untapped resource that could greatly benefit industry practitioners. The challenge lies in connecting the innovative insights from academia to real-world problems faced by developers. This project introduces ResearchBot, a tool designed to bridge this academia-industry gap. ResearchBot employs a modular approach, encompassing understanding questions, curating queries to obtain relevant papers in the CrossRef repository, summarizing paper content, and finally answering user questions based on paper summaries. The core objective of ResearchBot is to democratize access to academic knowledge for industry professionals. By providing concise summaries of cutting-edge research directly in response to SE-related questions, ResearchBot facilitates the application of academic insights to practical contexts. Ultimately, it aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry, using research evidence to support learning and decision-making in software development.

Problem

• Connecting academic insights to real-world developer problems
• Democratizing academic knowledge for industry professionals
• Bridging academia-industry gap with research evidence

Innovation

• Modular approach for querying and summarizing papers
• Bridges academia-industry gap with concise research summaries
• Democratizes academic knowledge for software developers