---
license: apache-2.0
language:
  - en
pretty_name: "StackPulse-778K: Developer Q&A & Code Dataset"
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
task_categories:
  - text-classification
  - question-answering
  - text-generation
  - feature-extraction
  - zero-shot-classification
tags:
  - stackoverflow
  - code
  - nlp
  - question-answering
  - programming
  - python
  - javascript
  - java
  - developer
  - community-qa
  - html
  - tags
configs:
  - config_name: full
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_778k_full.jsonl
  - config_name: unanswered
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_unanswered.jsonl
  - config_name: with_code
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_with_code.jsonl
  - config_name: high_quality
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_high_quality.jsonl
  - config_name: python
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_python.jsonl
  - config_name: javascript
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_javascript.jsonl
  - config_name: java
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_java.jsonl
  - config_name: csharp
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_csharp.jsonl
  - config_name: android
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/stackoverflow_android.jsonl
---

# 💻 StackOverflow-778K: Multi-Year Developer Q&A Dataset

## Dataset Summary

A large-scale Stack Overflow question dataset containing **778,929 unique
questions** sampled across **7 years (2015–2022)**. Each question includes the
raw HTML body, plain-text version, tags, score, view count, answer count, and
a rich set of derived features for immediate ML use.

Collected across **8 sampling runs** on Feb 27 2026, deduplicated to
**778,929 unique questions** with only 2 duplicates removed.

---

## 📁 Files in This Dataset

| File | Format | Rows | Description |
|------|--------|------|-------------|
| stackoverflow_778k_full.csv | CSV | 778,929 | Complete dataset |
| stackoverflow_unanswered.csv | CSV | 224,733 | Questions with 0 answers |
| stackoverflow_with_code.csv | CSV | 595,679 | Questions containing code blocks |
| stackoverflow_high_quality.csv | CSV | 20,205 | Score ≥ 5 and answered |
| stackoverflow_python.csv | CSV | 107,083 | Python-tagged questions |
| stackoverflow_javascript.csv | CSV | 87,367 | JavaScript-tagged questions |
| stackoverflow_java.csv | CSV | 54,077 | Java-tagged questions |
| stackoverflow_csharp.csv | CSV | 40,420 | C#-tagged questions |
| stackoverflow_android.csv | CSV | 42,004 | Android-tagged questions |
| *.jsonl versions | JSONL | same | HuggingFace-native format for all above |

---

## 🏗️ Schema Reference

| Column | Type | Description |
|--------|------|-------------|
| id | int64 | Unique Stack Overflow question ID |
| title | string | Question title |
| question_body | string | Raw HTML body (includes `<pre><code>` blocks) |
| body_text | string | Plain text body (HTML stripped, code replaced with [CODE]) |
| tags | string | Pipe-separated tags e.g. `python\|pandas\|dataframe` |
| score | int64 | Net upvotes (can be negative) |
| creation_date | string | ISO 8601 UTC creation timestamp |
| year | int32 | Year extracted from creation_date |
| month | int32 | Month (1–12) |
| hour | int32 | Hour of day (0–23, UTC) |
| dayofweek | int32 | Day of week (0=Monday, 6=Sunday) |
| view_count | int64 | Total question views |
| answer_count | int64 | Number of answers received |
| body_len | int64 | Plain text body character length |
| title_len | int64 | Title character length |
| tag_count | int64 | Number of tags (1–5) |
| code_block_cnt | int64 | Number of `<pre>` code blocks in body |
| has_code | bool | True if question contains at least one code block |
| is_unanswered | bool | True if answer_count == 0 |
| is_popular | bool | True if view_count > 95th percentile (~2,599) |
| is_viral | bool | True if view_count > 99th percentile (~11,513) |
| is_highly_voted | bool | True if score >= 10 |
| is_negative | bool | True if score < 0 |
| score_bucket | string | "negative" / "zero" / "low" / "medium" / "high" |

---

## 📈 Dataset Statistics

### Overview
- **Total questions**: 778,929
- **Date range**: 2015-02-14 → 2022-09-25
- **Missing years**: 2019, 2021 (sampling gaps)
- **Unique tags**: 41,754
- **Zero nulls** in all core columns (2 questions have empty tags)

### Score Distribution
- Mean: 0.69 | Median: 0 | Std: 4.77
- Range: -27 to 1,061
- Negative score: 63,415 (8.14%)
- Zero score: 461,977 (59.31%) — majority never upvoted
- Score ≥ 10: 7,431 (0.95%)
- Score ≥ 100: 246 (0.032%)

### View Count Distribution
- Mean: 794 | Median: 66 | P95: 2,599 | P99: 11,513
- Max: 915,870 views
- Popular (>P95): 38,944 (5.00%)
- Viral (>P99): 7,789 (1.00%)

### Answer Count
- Unanswered: 224,733 (28.85%)
- 1 answer: 387,399 (49.73%)
- 2+ answers: 166,797 (21.42%)
- Max answers on a single question: 36

### Question Body
- Has code block: 595,679 (76.47%)
- Avg code blocks per question: 1.56
- Avg body length: 557 chars | Median: 447 chars
- Avg title length: 59 chars

### Tags
- Avg tags per question: 3.01
- 5 tags (SO max): 117,671 (15.1%)
- 1 tag: 92,409 (11.9%)

### Questions Per Year
  - -1: 2,694
  - 2015: 99,664
  - 2016: 120,887
  - 2017: 20,791
  - 2018: 20,096
  - 2020: 99,676
  - 2022: 415,121
*(Note: 2017/2018 low counts reflect sampling focus; 2022 dominates at 53%)*

### Top 10 Tags
  - python (98,154)
  - javascript (87,156)
  - java (53,052)
  - c# (40,178)
  - android (38,543)
  - html (36,572)
  - php (34,656)
  - reactjs (31,727)
  - css (24,770)
  - r (21,694)

### Unanswered Rate by Top Tags
- node.js: 36.46% unanswered (hardest to answer)
- reactjs: 35.31%
- flutter: 33.44%
- typescript: 31.19%
- android: 30.49%
- python: 28.69%
- java: 26.88%
- css: 19.59% (easiest to get answered)
- jquery: 18.30%

---

## ⚠️ Known Issues & Caveats

1. **YEAR GAPS**: Years 2019 and 2021 are absent — this is a sampling artifact, not
   a gap in SO activity. Do not use for temporal trend analysis without noting this.

2. **2022 DOMINANCE**: 415,121 questions (53%) are from 2022. The dataset skews
   heavily toward recent questions. Stratify by year if balance matters.

3. **RAW HTML**: `question_body` contains raw HTML including `&lt;`, `&gt;`,
   `<pre><code>` blocks. Use `body_text` for NLP tasks. Use `question_body` for
   HTML-aware or code-extraction tasks.

4. **SCORE SKEW**: 59.3% of questions have score=0. Mean (0.69) is misleading.
   Use `score_bucket` or `is_highly_voted` for classification tasks.

5. **VIEW COUNT SKEW**: Mean (794) is 12× the median (66) due to viral questions.
   Use log-transformed view_count for regression tasks.

6. **PIPE-SEPARATED TAGS**: The `tags` column uses `|` as delimiter e.g.
   `python|pandas|dataframe`. Split with `str.split("|")` before use.

7. **CODE PLACEHOLDER**: In `body_text`, all `<pre>...</pre>` blocks are replaced
   with the token `[CODE]`. The original HTML is preserved in `question_body`.

8. **DUPLICATE IDs**: 2 exact duplicates were found and removed during processing.

---

## 🚀 Quick Start

### pandas

```python
import pandas as pd

# Full dataset
df = pd.read_csv("data/stackoverflow_778k_full.csv")

# High quality only (score >= 5, answered)
hq = pd.read_csv("data/stackoverflow_high_quality.csv")

# Python questions only
py = pd.read_csv("data/stackoverflow_python.csv")

# Unanswered questions (good for difficulty modeling)
ua = pd.read_csv("data/stackoverflow_unanswered.csv")

# Split tags into list
df["tag_list"] = df["tags"].str.split("|")

# Filter by year
df_2022 = df[df["year"] == 2022]

# Log-transform view count for regression
import numpy as np
df["log_views"] = np.log1p(df["view_count"])
```

### HuggingFace datasets

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

REPO = "Omarrran/StackPulse_778K_QnA_Code_dataset"

# Full 778K
ds = load_dataset(REPO, "full")

# High quality only
hq = load_dataset(REPO, "high_quality")

# Python questions
py = load_dataset(REPO, "python")

# Unanswered questions
ua = load_dataset(REPO, "unanswered")

# Convert to pandas
df = ds["train"].to_pandas()
```

---

## 🔬 Suggested Research Tasks

| Task | Config | Key Columns |
|------|--------|-------------|
| Answer prediction (binary) | full | title, body_text, tags → is_unanswered |
| Score regression | full | title, body_text, tags → score |
| View count prediction | full | title, tags, score → log(view_count) |
| Tag recommendation | full | title, body_text → tags |
| Code vs no-code classification | full | body_text → has_code |
| Question quality scoring | full | title, body_text → score_bucket |
| LLM fine-tuning (Q&A) | high_quality | title + body_text as prompt |
| Difficulty estimation | full | tags → unanswered rate per tag |
| Time-of-day analysis | full | hour, dayofweek → view_count / score |
| Language-specific modeling | python/javascript/java | any |

---

## 📋 Citation

```bibtex
@dataset{malik2026stackoverflow,
  author    = {Malik, Omar Haq Nawaz},
  title     = {StackOverflow-778K: Multi-Year Developer Q&A Dataset},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {HuggingFace},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/Omarrran/StackPulse_778K_QnA_Code_dataset},
  questions = {778929},
  years     = {2015-2022},
  license   = {Apache-2.0}
}
```

---

## 👤 Author

**Omar Haq Nawaz Malik** (HuggingFace: [Omarrran](https://huggingface.co/Omarrran))
AI Engineer & NLP Researcher | BITS Pilani | Srinagar, Kashmir