Feat: Automated Duplicate Issue Detection

[Abhinandankaushik]

Overview

This proposal outlines a feature to automatically detect and flag potential duplicate issues in the repository. The system will analyze newly created issues and compare them with existing ones to reduce redundancy, improve maintainability, and streamline issue management.

Problem Statement

Currently, contributors may unknowingly create duplicate issues due to:

• Lack of prior search
• Similar but differently worded issue titles
• Large issue backlog

This leads to:

• Increased maintainer workload
• Fragmented discussions
• Wasted developer effort
• Slower triaging process

A structured, automated duplicate detection mechanism is required to mitigate these inefficiencies.

Proposed Solution

The system will perform the following steps when a new issue is created:

Issue Ingestion

Capture new issue title and description.

Similarity Analysis

• Compare the new issue against:
  • Open issues
  • Recently closed issues

Using:

• Text similarity algorithms (Cosine Similarity / TF-IDF / embeddings)
• Fuzzy matching (Levenshtein / Fuse.js)
• Keyword matching

Duplicate Detection Mechanism

If a potential duplicate is detected:

• Automatically comment on the issue with:

  • “Possible duplicate of #XX”

• Tag issue with label: potential-duplicate

• Provide list of top 3 similar issues

Technical Approach

GitHub Actions

Trigger:

on:
  issues:
    types: [opened]

Workflow:

1. Fetch existing issues via GitHub API
2. Compute similarity score
3. If similarity > threshold (e.g., 0.75), comment and label issue

Record

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct
• I want to work on this issue

[github-actions]

👋 Thanks for opening this issue! The maintainers will review it shortly. Till then, do not open any PR. This is a strict rule we like to follow around here :)

[Abhinandankaushik]

Hi @rahulharpal1603,

If this feature proposal looks actionable and aligns with the project goals, I would appreciate it if you could assign it to me. I am happy to take this forward and work on the implementation.

Thank you!

[Abhinandankaushik]

Duplicate of #1110