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language:
- en
task_categories:
- text-classification
size_categories:
- 100K<n<1M
tags:
- reddit
- changemyview
- persuasion
- conversation
- temporal-evaluation
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: train.csv
- split: time_split
path: time_split.csv
- split: random_holdout
path: random_holdout.csv
---
# Change My View Data
Reddit r/changemyview posts and conversation branches for studying whether an original poster acknowledges a change of view. Each row represents a top-level comment and a selected branch of discussion between its author and the original poster.
The target, `delta`, is `1` when the original poster awards the top-level commenter a delta confirmed by DeltaBot, and `0` for an eligible discussion without a detected confirmed delta in that top-level thread. It measures an observed acknowledgment, not a causal effect or an independent assessment of argument quality.
## Files and splits
| Split | File | Rows | Construction |
|---|---|---:|---|
| `train` | `train.csv` | 572,119 | Posts created before June 1, 2025 UTC, excluding the 6,000-row random holdout. |
| `random_holdout` | `random_holdout.csv` | 6,000 | Earlier-period held-out rows: 5,000 with `delta=0` and 1,000 with `delta=1`. |
| `time_split` | `time_split.csv` | 116,472 | The 68,967-row June-December 2025 holdout, plus 39,646 rows from the main 2026 export and 7,859 rows from the June-July 2026 export. |
| Split | `delta=0` | `delta=1` |
|---|---:|---:|
| `train` | 520,900 | 51,219 |
| `random_holdout` | 5,000 | 1,000 |
| `time_split` | 109,119 | 7,353 |
The date cutoff is based on **post creation time**, not comment time. Despite the historical name "2025 second half," the temporal holdout starts on **June 1**, not July 1.
The 2026 data covers January 1-June 15 and June 20-July 31 by observed post timestamps; it is not a complete calendar-year sample and has a gap between the two collection windows. The separate January-March and April-June exports are subdivisions of the main 2026 export and are not added again. The three temporal source exports have no shared `(post_id, comment_id)` pairs.
The temporal split is post-disjoint from both earlier splits. The random holdout is a row-level sample, not a post-disjoint or author-disjoint evaluation set: 5,619 of its 5,640 distinct posts also appear in training. Source duplicates leave one `(post_id, comment_id)` pair shared between training and the random holdout. Training has 133 rows beyond its number of unique ID pairs; neither holdout has repeated ID pairs internally. Existing duplicates are preserved rather than silently changing the supplied samples. The random holdout's 5:1 class ratio is intentional; the other splits retain their source label distribution.
## Construction from raw posts and comments
### 1. Read source records
The historical collection is read from compressed JSONL archives of r/changemyview submissions and comments. The later collection uses JSONL downloads; the available download script retrieves posts and comments from the Arctic Shift API. Raw archives are not included here. Malformed JSON lines are skipped, and invalid UTF-8 bytes are replaced during decoding.
Posts are indexed by their Reddit submission ID. A post is retained only when:
- Its body is nonempty and is not the literal marker `[deleted]` or `[removed]`.
- It is not marked `over_18`.
- Its author is present and is not a deletion/removal marker.
The title, body, author, creation timestamp, and archived post score are retained for constructing observations.
### 2. Associate comments with posts and reconstruct threads
Only comments whose `link_id` points to a qualifying post are considered. For each comment, the builder retains its ID, parent ID, author, body, timestamp, and score. Bodies equal to `[deleted]` or `[removed]` become empty strings.
Parent links are followed to associate descendants with a top-level comment. Cycles, missing parents, and invalid parent chains cannot produce a usable branch. The archive's recorded parent structure, rather than a flat chronological list of every reply, determines the conversation.
### 3. Identify confirmed delta awards
A positive candidate requires all of the following:
- A recorded comment authored by `DeltaBot`.
- Its parent is a comment authored by the original poster.
- That original-poster comment contains a delta symbol (`delta` as `δ` or `Δ`) or the command `!delta`.
- The bot message contains a `/u/username` recipient reference.
- The award can be traced to a top-level comment.
The builder records the first qualifying confirmation encountered for each top-level thread. If its recipient differs from the top-level commenter's username, that thread is excluded rather than labeled positive or negative. Recipient matching is case-insensitive.
### 4. Require original-poster activity
A post is excluded when it has **neither** a detected confirmed delta **nor** at least six recorded replies by the original poster.
Eligible top-level comments must be created no later than the earlier of:
- The original poster's last recorded reply on the post.
- Seven days after the post was created.
This bounds eligibility of the **top-level comment**. It does not impose a separate seven-day truncation on every subsequent message used to form its branch.
Top-level comments are also excluded when their author is missing/deleted, is the original poster, is `DeltaBot` or `AutoModerator`, or their body is empty/deleted.
### 5. Assign labels and choose a branch endpoint
For `delta=1`, the endpoint is the original-poster comment associated with the detected confirmed award to the top-level commenter.
For `delta=0`, there must be at least one original-poster reply somewhere under that top-level comment. The endpoint is the latest such reply by timestamp. A thread where the original poster never engages is excluded, not treated as a negative example.
The builder traces a single parent-linked path from the top-level comment to the endpoint. It keeps only messages by the original poster and the top-level commenter, removing third-party messages. It then removes the final original-poster message, so the endpoint award/reaction itself is not included in the exported conversation. A branch is retained only if it is nonempty and starts with the top-level commenter.
This is a selected **branch**, not the entire comment tree. Intervening original-poster replies remain in the conversation.
### 6. Serialize text and compute features
`OC_comments` contains only the top-level commenter's retained messages, serialized as a JSON list of strings. `conversation` contains both participants' retained messages, formatted as `[username]: message`, separated by blank lines.
`log_length` is the natural logarithm of one plus the whitespace-separated word count of the initial top-level comment. It is not the length of the full conversation. Source exports use slightly different decimal rounding.
### 7. Construct the published splits
The historical export has 647,086 rows: 578,119 from posts before June 1, 2025 UTC and 68,967 on or after that cutoff. The earlier pool is divided into the 6,000-row random holdout and 572,119 training rows. The original random-sampling script and seed were not available, so exact sampling reproducibility is not claimed.
The published temporal split concatenates the existing later-2025 export, the main January-June 2026 export, and the June-July 2026 export. It does not resample or rebalance these sources.
One training record in the supplied CSV was damaged across two parsed records. For this release, that record was restored from the corresponding complete historical-source row, and its stray trailing fragment was discarded. This restores the intended 572,119 training observations. Original source files were not modified. No other deduplication or class balancing was applied during publication.
## Columns
All three CSVs use the same schema.
| Column | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `post_id` | String | Reddit submission ID, without the `t3_` prefix. |
| `comment_id` | String | Top-level comment ID, without the `t1_` prefix. IDs may repeat in the historical source. |
| `delta` | Integer, 0 or 1 | Target indicating a detected original-poster delta confirmed by DeltaBot for the top-level commenter. |
| `post_created_utc` | Integer | Submission creation time as Unix seconds in UTC. |
| `title` | String | Original post title. |
| `argument` | String | Original post body. |
| `OC_comments` | String containing JSON | Ordered list of the top-level commenter's messages on the selected branch. Parse with `json.loads()`. |
| `conversation` | String | Selected two-person conversation with `[username]:` speaker markers. |
| `log_length` | Float | `ln(1 + word_count)` of the initial top-level comment. |
| `post_score` | Integer | Archived Reddit submission score, not the comment score or necessarily a value observed before the outcome. |
CSV text fields can contain commas, quotation marks, and embedded newlines. Use a CSV-aware reader rather than splitting on commas or physical lines.
## Loading
```python
import json
from datasets import load_dataset
data = load_dataset("Harini/changemyview_data")
train = data["train"]
temporal_test = data["time_split"]
random_test = data["random_holdout"]
messages = json.loads(train[0]["OC_comments"])
```
## Limitations and responsible use
The data selects active posts and threads with original-poster engagement, so it is not a representative sample of all subreddit discussions. A negative label means no qualifying confirmed award was detected under the extraction rules, not proof that the original poster never changed their mind. Archive omissions, deleted comments, and incomplete collection windows can affect both branch reconstruction and labels.
Removing the final original-poster message reduces direct outcome exposure but does not guarantee leakage-free text. Archived scores may reflect later activity. The random holdout can share posts, users, and the noted duplicate ID with training; use the temporal split when evaluating chronological transfer, while recognizing that users can still recur across time.
Reddit usernames and user-authored text are retained, and the corpus is not comprehensively anonymized or screened for sensitive content. Excluding posts marked `over_18` does not guarantee the remaining text is safe or nonsensitive. Do not use the data to identify, profile, or target individuals. Redistribution does not establish a new license for the underlying user content; users should assess applicable Reddit terms, source-access conditions, and content rights.
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