# An Insight into the Unresolved Questions at Stack Overflow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01850 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01850/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Forgotten Role of Search Queries in IR-based Bug Localization: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05341/) (2021)
- [RAG-Reflect: Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Reflections for Comment-Driven Code Maintenance on Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22217/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For a significant number of questions at Stack Overflow, none of the posted answers were accepted as solutions. Acceptance of an answer indicates that the answer actually solves the discussed problem in the question, and the question is answered sufficiently. In this paper, we investigate 3,956 such unresolved questions using an exploratory study where we analyze four important aspects of those questions, their answers and the corresponding users that partially explain the observed scenario. We then propose a prediction model by employing five metrics related to user behaviour, topics and popularity of question, which predicts if the best answer for a question at Stack Overflow might remain unaccepted or not. Experiments using 8,057 questions show that the model can predict unresolved questions with 78.70% precision and 76.10% recall.