ResearchBot: Bridging the Gap between Academic Research and Practical Programming Communities
Sahar Farzanehpour, Swetha Rajeev, Huayu Liang, Ritvik Prabhu, Chris Brown
TL;DR
The paper tackles the gap between academic software engineering research and practical programming needs by introducing ResearchBot, a modular system that retrieves scholarly papers from CrossRef, extracts and summarizes abstracts, and answers Stack Exchange–related questions with citations. The Retrieval Module uses GPT-4 to form structured queries, while the QA Module produces concise, citation-backed responses compatible with CS queries. An evaluation on 100 SE Q&A pairs compares ResearchBot to other LLMs using semantic textual similarity and manual assessment, showing that ResearchBot delivers human-like, evidence-based answers with scholarly references, often outperforming non-academic sources. The work highlights the potential of evidence-based tools to enhance knowledge transfer from academia to industry and outlines concrete future directions, including repository expansion, code-analysis capabilities, and platform integrations to widen impact.
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.