A replicated study on duplicate detection: using apache lucene to search among Android defects

Context: Duplicate detection is a fundamental part of issue management. Systems able to predict whether a new defect report will be closed as a duplicate, may decrease costs by limiting rework and collecting related pieces of information. Goal: Our work explores using Apache Lucene for large-scale duplicate detection based on textual content. Also, we evaluate the previous claim that results are improved if the title is weighted as more important than the description. Method: We conduct a conceptual replication of a well-cited study conducted at Sony Ericsson, using Lucene for searching in the public Android defect repository. In line with the original study, we explore how varying the weighting of the title and the description affects the accuracy. Results: We show that Lucene obtains the best results when the defect report title is weighted three times higher than the description, a bigger difference than has been previously acknowledged. Conclusions: Our work shows the potential of using Lucene as a scalable solution for duplicate detection.