CoRAC: Integrating Selective API Document Retrieval with Question Semantic Intent for Code Question Answering

Automatic code question answering aims to generate precise answers to questions about code by analyzing code snippets. To provide an appropriate answer, it is necessary to accurately understand the relevant part of the code and correctly interpret the intent of the question. However, in real-world scenarios, the questioner often provides only a portion of the code along with the question, making it challenging to find an answer. The responder should be capable of providing a suitable answer using such limited information. We propose a knowledge-based framework, CoRAC, an automatic code question responder that enhances understanding through selective API document retrieval and question semantic intent clustering. We evaluate our method on three real-world benchmark datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness through various experiments. We also show that our method can generate high-quality answers compared to large language models, such as ChatGPT.