Is it feasible to detect FLOSS version release events from textual messages? A case study on Stack Overflow

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) is a very active research question within the area of text mining, generally applied to news feeds and Twitter datasets, where topics and events are detected. The notion of “event” is broad, but typically it applies to occurrences that can be detected from a single post or a message. Little attention has been drawn to what we call “micro-events”, which, due to their nature, cannot be detected from a single piece of textual information. The study investigates the feasibility of micro-event detection on textual data using a sample of messages from the Stack Overflow Q&A platform and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) version releases from Libraries.io dataset. We build pipelines for detection of micro-events using three different estimators whose parameters are optimized using a grid search approach. We consider two feature spaces: LDA topic modeling with sentiment analysis, and hSBM topics with sentiment analysis. The feature spaces are optimized using the recursive feature elimination with cross validation (RFECV) strategy. In our experiments we investigate whether there is a characteristic change in the topics distribution or sentiment features before or after micro-events take place and we thoroughly evaluate the capacity of each variant of our analysis pipeline to detect micro-events. Additionally, we perform a detailed statistical analysis of the models, including influential cases, variance inflation factors, validation of the linearity assumption, pseudo R(2) measures and no-information rate. Finally, in order to study limits of micro-event detection, we design a method for generating micro-event synthetic datasets with similar properties to the real-world data, and use them to identify the micro-event detectability threshold for each of the evaluated classifiers.