mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Code and Named Entity Recognition in StackOverflow

arXiv 2005.01634 ↗First posted 4 May 2020cs.CLcited by 39

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Abstract (arXiv)

There is an increasing interest in studying natural language and computer code together, as large corpora of programming texts become readily available on the Internet. For example, StackOverflow currently has over 15 million programming related questions written by 8.5 million users. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of fundamental NLP techniques for identifying code tokens or software-related named entities that appear within natural language sentences. In this paper, we introduce a new named entity recognition (NER) corpus for the computer programming domain, consisting of 15,372 sentences annotated with 20 fine-grained entity types. We trained in-domain BERT representations (BERTOverflow) on 152 million sentences from StackOverflow, which lead to an absolute increase of +10 F-1 score over off-the-shelf BERT. We also present the SoftNER model which achieves an overall 79.10 F1 score for code and named entity recognition on StackOverflow data. Our SoftNER model incorporates a context-independent code token classifier with corpus-level features to improve the BERT-based tagging model. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jeniyat/StackOverflowNER/

Key facts. Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 May 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 6; 2022: 5; 2023: 15; 2024: 9; 2025: 4.

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  1. 2023Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 389
  2. 2023UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognitioncited by 70
  3. 2023GeoLM: Empowering Language Models for Geospatially Grounded Language Understandingcited by 37
  4. 2023MosaicBERT: A Bidirectional Encoder Optimized for Fast Pretrainingcited by 33
  5. 2022SpaBERT: A Pretrained Language Model from Geographic Data for Geo-Entity Representationcited by 23
  6. 2023ReadMe++: Benchmarking Multilingual Language Models for Multi-Domain Readability Assessmentcited by 19
  7. 2024Few-shot Name Entity Recognition on StackOverflowcited by 14
  8. 2021De-identification of Privacy-related Entities in Job Postingscited by 12
  9. 2023A Review of the Trends and Challenges in Adopting Natural Language Processing Methods for Education Feedback Analysiscited by 12
  10. 2021On the validity of pre-trained transformers for natural language processing in the software engineering domaincited by 11
  11. 2022Automatic Document Selection for Efficient Encoder Pretrainingcited by 11
  12. 2023Zero-Shot Learning for Requirements Classification: An Exploratory Studycited by 9
27 more
  1. 2021Reading StackOverflow Encourages Cheating: Adding Question Text Improves Extractive Code Generationcited by 8
  2. 2024A Unified Taxonomy-Guided Instruction Tuning Framework for Entity Set Expansion and Taxonomy Expansioncited by 7
  3. 2021Can Machines Read Coding Manuals Yet? -- A Benchmark for Building Better Language Models for Code Understandingcited by 5
  4. 2021Learning to Describe Solutions for Bug Reports Based on Developer Discussionscited by 5
  5. 2024ETF: An Entity Tracing Framework for Hallucination Detection in Code Summariescited by 5
  6. 2024CoAM: Corpus of All-Type Multiword Expressionscited by 4
  7. 2022An Empirical Study of IoT Security Aspects at Sentence-Level in Developer Textual Discussionscited by 3
  8. 2023NL2CMD: An Updated Workflow for Natural Language to Bash Commands Translationcited by 3
  9. 2023Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with Unified Model in the Cybersecurity Domaincited by 3
  10. 2022Entity Set Co-Expansion in StackOverflowcited by 2
  11. 2024Leveraging Encoder-only Large Language Models for Mobile App Review Feature Extractioncited by 2
  12. 2025SDLog: A Deep Learning Framework for Detecting Sensitive Information in Software Logscited by 2
  13. 2023Bayesian Networks for Named Entity Prediction in Programming Community Question Answeringcited by 1
  14. 2023Software Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learningcited by 1
  15. 2023Characterizing and Classifying Developer Forum Posts with their Intentionscited by 1
  16. 2024Seed-Guided Fine-Grained Entity Typing in Science and Engineering Domainscited by 1
  17. 2024Beyond Keywords: A Context-based Hybrid Approach to Mining Ethical Concern-related App Reviewscited by 1
  18. 2025How Effective are Generative Large Language Models in Performing Requirements Classification?cited by 1
  19. 2021Towards Realistic Single-Task Continuous Learning Research for NERcited by 0
  20. 2022Effectiveness of Transformer Models on IoT Security Detection in StackOverflow Discussionscited by 0
  21. 2023Skill over Scale: The Case for Medium, Domain-Specific Models for SEcited by 0
  22. 2023Contrastive Learning for API Aspect Analysiscited by 0
  23. 2023Redefining Developer Assistance: Through Large Language Models in Software Ecosystemcited by 0
  24. 2024DistALANER: Distantly Supervised Active Learning Augmented Named Entity Recognition in the Open Source Software Ecosystemcited by 0
  25. 2024Generative Language Models Potential for Requirement Engineering Applications: Insights into Current Strengths and Limitationscited by 0
  26. 2025Towards Refining Developer Questions using LLM-Based Named Entity Recognition for Developer Chatroom Conversationscited by 0
  27. 2025ArchISMiner: A Framework for Automatic Mining of Architectural Issue-Solution Pairs from Online Developer Communitiescited by 0