Answering questions about unanswered questions of Stack Overflow
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Community-based question answering services accumulate large volumes of knowledge through the voluntary services of people across the globe. Stack Overflow is an example of such a service that targets developers and software engineers. In general, questions in Stack Overflow are answered in a very short time. However, we found that the number of unanswered questions has increased significantly in the past two years. Understanding why questions remain unanswered can help information seekers improve the quality of their questions, increase their chances of getting answers, and better decide when to use Stack Overflow services. In this paper, we mine data on unanswered questions from Stack Overflow. We then conduct a qualitative study to categorize unanswered questions, which reveals characteristics that would be difficult to find otherwise. Finally, we conduct an experiment to determine whether we can predict how long a question will remain unanswered in Stack Overflow.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it