preselection and processing of attributes we should also only keep those attributes that we think could help the classifier in determining the good from the not-so-good answers certainlywe need the identification-related attributes to assign the correct answers to the questions read the following attributesthe posttype attributefor exampleis only necessary to distinguish between questions and answers furthermorewe can distinguish between them later by checking for the parentid attribute sowe keep it for questions tooand set it to the creationdate attribute could be interesting to determine the time span between posting the question and posting the individual answersso we keep it the score attribute isof courseimportant as an indicator of the community' evaluation the viewcount attributein contrastis most likely of no use for our task even if it is able to help the classifier distinguish between good and badwe will not have this information at the time when an answer is being submitted we will ignore it the body attribute obviously contains the most important information as it is encoded in htmlwe will have to decode it to plain text the owneruserid attribute is useful only if we will take the user-dependent features into accountwhich we won' although we drop it herewe encourage you to use it (maybe in connection with users xmlto build better classifier the title attribute is also ignored herealthough it could add some more information about the question the commentcount attribute is also ignored similar to viewcountit could help the classifier with posts that were posted while ago (more comments are equal to more ambiguous postsit willhowevernot help the classifier at the time that an answer is posted the acceptedanswerid attribute is similar to the score attributethat isit is an indicator of post' quality as we will access this per answerinstead of keeping this attributewe will create new attributeisacceptedwhich will be or for answers and ignored for questions (parentid