Synergizing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs: A Novel Approach to Software Repository-Related Question Answering

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Main Authors: Abedu, Samuel, Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan, Shihab, Emad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Abedu, Samuel
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Shihab, Emad
author_facet Abedu, Samuel
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Shihab, Emad
contents Software repositories contain valuable information for understanding the development process. However, extracting insights from repository data is time-consuming and requires technical expertise. While software engineering chatbots support natural language interactions with repositories, chatbots struggle to understand questions beyond their trained intents and to accurately retrieve the relevant data. This study aims to improve the accuracy of LLM-based chatbots in answering repository-related questions by augmenting them with knowledge graphs. We use a two-step approach: constructing a knowledge graph from repository data, and synergizing the knowledge graph with an LLM to handle natural language questions and answers. We curated 150 questions of varying complexity and evaluated the approach on five popular open-source projects. Our initial results revealed the limitations of the approach, with most errors due to the reasoning ability of the LLM. We therefore applied few-shot chain-of-thought prompting, which improved accuracy to 84%. We also compared against baselines (MSRBot and GPT-4o-search-preview), and our approach performed significantly better. In a task-based user study with 20 participants, users completed more tasks correctly and in less time with our approach, and they reported that it was useful. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs and knowledge graphs are a viable solution for making repository data accessible.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03815
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synergizing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs: A Novel Approach to Software Repository-Related Question Answering
Abedu, Samuel
Khatoonabadi, SayedHassan
Shihab, Emad
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Software repositories contain valuable information for understanding the development process. However, extracting insights from repository data is time-consuming and requires technical expertise. While software engineering chatbots support natural language interactions with repositories, chatbots struggle to understand questions beyond their trained intents and to accurately retrieve the relevant data. This study aims to improve the accuracy of LLM-based chatbots in answering repository-related questions by augmenting them with knowledge graphs. We use a two-step approach: constructing a knowledge graph from repository data, and synergizing the knowledge graph with an LLM to handle natural language questions and answers. We curated 150 questions of varying complexity and evaluated the approach on five popular open-source projects. Our initial results revealed the limitations of the approach, with most errors due to the reasoning ability of the LLM. We therefore applied few-shot chain-of-thought prompting, which improved accuracy to 84%. We also compared against baselines (MSRBot and GPT-4o-search-preview), and our approach performed significantly better. In a task-based user study with 20 participants, users completed more tasks correctly and in less time with our approach, and they reported that it was useful. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs and knowledge graphs are a viable solution for making repository data accessible.
title Synergizing LLMs and Knowledge Graphs: A Novel Approach to Software Repository-Related Question Answering
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03815