SOTorrent Dataset

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question-and-answer website for software developers, providing a large amount of code snippets and free-form text on a wide variety of topics. Like other software artifacts, questions and answers on SO evolve over time, for example when bugs in code snippets are fixed, code is updated to work with a more recent library version, or text surrounding a code snippet is edited for clarity. To be able to analyze how content on SO evolves, we built <em>SOTorrent</em>, an open dataset based on the official SO data dump. <em>SOTorrent </em>provides access to the version history of SO content at the level of whole posts and individual text or code blocks. It connects SO posts to other platforms by aggregating URLs from text blocks and comments, and by collecting references from GitHub files to SO posts. Our vision is that researchers will use <em>SOTorrent </em>to investigate and understand the evolution of SO posts and their relation to other platforms such as GitHub. <strong>If you use this dataset in your work, please cite our MSR 2018 paper (BibTex) or our MSR 2019 mining challenge proposal.</strong>堆栈溢出（Stack Overflow，以下简称SO）是面向软件开发人员的最热门问答网站，提供了海量涵盖各类主题的代码片段与自由格式文本。与其他软件工件（software artifacts）类似，SO上的问答内容会随时间演进，例如修复代码片段中的漏洞、更新代码以适配更新版本的依赖库，或是为提升可读性而编辑代码片段周边的文本。为了分析SO上的内容演进规律，我们构建了<em>SOTorrent</em>——一个基于SO官方数据导出文件的开源数据集。<em>SOTorrent</em>支持从完整帖子、单条文本或代码块的维度，获取SO内容的版本历史。该数据集通过提取文本块与评论中的URL、收集GitHub文件中指向SO帖子的引用，实现SO帖子与其他平台的关联。我们的愿景是，研究人员可借助<em>SOTorrent</em>探究并理解SO帖子的演进规律，以及其与GitHub等其他平台的关联关系。<strong>若您在研究工作中使用本数据集，请引用我们的MSR 2018会议论文（BibTex格式）或MSR 2019挖掘挑战赛提案。</strong>