Rahimi, Mona, and Jane Cleland-Huang. "Personas in the middle: Automated support for creating personas as focal points in feature gathering forums." Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering. 2014.

This paper introduces a novel method for automating persona creation from feature requests in software forums. The approach employs topic clustering, classification, and association rules to organize feature requests into meaningful groups, which are then used to develop personas. These personas help manage and prioritize feature requests, track changes, and facilitate stakeholder communication. The method is demonstrated with examples from the health-insurance sector and evaluated using feature requests from the SugarCRM project.