The quantity of posts (answers, questions), comments, reviews and other actions on Stack Overflow is huge. We are right at the beginning of our implementation and need support from other community members to both refine current programs and to address issues that have not been implemented yet.
These are some examples, but you’re stepping in to an area where not only your programming skills are needed but also your ideas and passion are welcomed.
What follows is a list of our projects, and some particular areas they need help with. If you need additional information don’t hesitate to join us in the SOBotics chat room, members from all over the world are active almost 24/7.
Guttenberg – Java
More sources
At the moment, Guttenberg can only compare posts to linked or related questions and some results from Google (limited to 100 requests/day). Using other sources or different search engines could improve the results.
Test winnowing algorithm to compare posts
A research found out that the Winnowing algorithm might be useful to compare posts. See this comment on GitHub.
More reasons for a post to be reported (LINQ?)
With SOBotics/Guttenberg#74, it will be easier to add reasons that trigger a report. It would be helpful, ff someone comes up with new reasons that could improve our results. For this, implementing LINQ could be tested. ( SOBotics/Guttenberg#73 )
Natty – Java
Addition of Machine Learning techniques to detect questions posted as answers.
Over a period of 1 week, we have collected a dataset of all the new answers to old questions. Coupled with SEDE, we can discover a machine learning approach to detect questions posted as answers instead of the present heuristics based approach.
Implementation of intelligent blacklist
The blacklisted words all have the same value at the moment. Getting data from Sentinel, we can find out as to how many false positives are there and find a way to autoscale the blacklist filter value.
Heat Detector – Java
Improving the NLP System
Are you good at machine learning?, do you have ideas on how to improve our algorithms and or feed?.
The NLP system needs improvement both with integrating new data and improving parameters on the machine learning algorithm.
Improving perspective reports by providing feedback
Perspective has given us an api key to test, we are currently reporting hits that are above 0.5. However we have a fairly high amount of “false positive”, mostly due to sentences as “I’m an idiot”. To solve this problem there is the need to implement the feed-back system and probably come up with some ideas on how to consider also our feed.
FireAlarm/SwiftChatSE – Swift
SQLite database
We’re currently migrating away from JSON to SQLite for data storage. Here’s what needs to be updated to use a database, roughly ordered by when I plan to do them:
ChatRoomandChatUser. TheuserNamedanduserWithIDfunctions should query the database, andlookupUserInformationshould save the information to the database. Remember that users are not synchronized across rooms, so the table will alsohostandroomIDcolumns.- The privilege system. This will involve creating a join table containing
userIDandprivilegeID.privilegeIDshould probably be a raw enum value and not a key in another table. - The report storage. This will need a
reportstable containingpostID,date,score, anddetails. Storage of messages will need another table containingreportID,host,roomID, andmessageID. - The non-Bayesian filters. These filters are not static, so they’ll be in the same database as everything else.
Better machine learning
As far as I know, none of us in SOBotics are machine learning experts. If you’re good with machine learning and you want to improve FireAlarm’s filter, we’d be grateful! Right now we’re just using Naive Bayes; nothing too fancy or particularly precise.
Badger – Java
Ability to detect the posts that have received the tumbleweed badges
Tumbleweed badge API returns only the user details. Using the data present on the user, we can find out as to which of their questions received the tumbleweed badge and then show those instead. Adding batches of Tumbleweed posts is the next thought.
Belisarius – Java
Adding a dashboard – Hippo
Belisarius detects vandalized posts at a good accuracy but there is no dashboard to track these reports. This can be done using Higgs.
Better detection of vandalized posts
The current filters do return some false positives and refining them would be a really good start to make the bot return more fruitful results.
apicache – Python/Flask/Redis
APICache is a project that aims to provide a centralised server for getting cached responses from the Stack Exchange API. This saves on bots’ quotas, as responses are cached and made available to everyone, no matter who requested them originally.
MORE ROUTES
APICache only exposes a limited subset of routes at the moment. More development is needed to expand this to a larger subset of the routes available in the SE API.
Citation Detector – Java
Citation Detector is a new project that aims to report those posts that have comments asking for users to cite appropriate sources on Hinduism Stack Exchange. (Based on a meta post asking for the same)
New projects that are yet to be started
LQP Queue Monitor
Low Quality Posts queue is infested with robo-reviewers who have deleted many posts which turn up as bad audits. We have start to develop a bot in java, but time is running short are you ready to continue this development.