Welcome to the Reddit Self-Post Classification Task (RSPCT)!

The aim of this dataset was to create an interesting, large text classification problem with many classes, that does not suffer from label sparsity as most datasets of its type do. See the blog post for a more detailed write up, or the paper here. The aim is to classify self-posts into the subreddit into which they were posted. A great deal of effort has gone into selecting a ‘good’ set of subreddits to minimise overlap in content.

We recommend you look at the blogpost write-up for this dataset before continuing. There is also a rough draft of a paper here if you have more detailed questions.

Data

The data consists of 1.013M self-posts, posted from 1013 subreddits (1000 examples per class). For each post we give the subreddit, the title and content of the self-post.

We have also given a manual annotation of about 3000 subreddits which went into the creation of this dataset, in subreddit_info.csv, this was the main criteria for selecting which subreddits went into this dataset. We include a top-level category and subcategory for each subreddit, and a reason for exclusion if this does not appear in the data.

Recommendations

We recommend splitting out the last 20% of the data as a test set (we have organised so that this is a random, stratified sample of all the data. In our experiments, we have been optimising for the precision-at-K metric for K = {1, 3, 5}