Logging is an integral part of software development. Software practitioners often face issues in software logging, and they post these issues on Q&A websites to take suggestions from the experts. In this study, we perform a three-level empirical analysis of logging questions posted on six popular technical Q&A websites, namely, Stack Overflow (SO), Serverfault (SF), Superuser (SU), Database Administrators (DB), Software Engineering (SE), and Android Enthusiasts (AE). The findings show that logging issues are prevalent across various domains, for example, database, networks, and mobile computing, and software practitioners from different domains face different logging issues. The semantic analysis of logging questions using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) reveals trends of several existing and new logging topics, such as logging conversion pattern, Android device logging, and database logging. In addition, we observe specific logging topics for each website: DB (log shipping and log file growing/shrinking), SU (event log and syslog configuration), SF (log analysis and syslog configuration), AE (app install and usage tracking), SE (client server logging and exception logging), and SO (log file creation/deletion, Android emulator logging, and logger class of Log4j). We obtain an increasing trend of logging topics on the SO, SU, and DB websites whereas a decreasing trend of logging topics on the SF website.

中文翻译：

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日志问题的探索性语义分析

日志记录是软件开发的一个组成部分。软件从业者经常面临软​​件日志的问题，他们将这些问题发布在问答网站上，以听取专家的建议。在这项研究中，我们对六个流行的技术问答网站上发布的日志问题进行了三级实证分析，即堆栈溢出 (SO)、服务器故障 (SF)、超级用户 (SU)、数据库管理员 (DB)、软件工程 ( SE) 和 Android 爱好者 (AE)。研究结果表明，日志问题在各个领域都很普遍，例如数据库、网络和移动计算，来自不同领域的软件从业者面临不同的日志问题。使用潜在狄利克雷分配 (LDA) 对日志问题的语义分析揭示了几个现有和新日志主题的趋势，例如日志转换模式、Android 设备日志和数据库日志。此外，我们观察每个网站的特定日志主题：DB（日志传送和日志文件增长/收缩）、SU（事件日志和系统日志配置）、SF（日志分析和系统日志配置）、AE（应用安装和使用跟踪） 、SE（客户端服务器日志记录和异常日志记录）和 SO（日志文件创建/删除、Android 模拟器日志记录和Log4j 的记录器类）。我们在 SO、SU 和 DB 网站上获得了日志主题的增加趋势，而在 SF 网站上的日志主题则呈下降趋势。