SIEVE: A Parameterized GitHub Corpus Builder for Software Engineering Research

Musfiqur Rahman, Mahi Begoug, Emad Shihab

Software engineering research increasingly relies on large, richly annotated corpora of real-world code. Still, researchers typically assemble these with ad-hoc scripts or static, pre-built datasets that offer no control over corpus composition. This leaves a gap for a reusable tool that goes below the repository level and builds annotated, function- and class-level code corpora under researcher-specified criteria. We present SIEVE (Software Ingestion & Extraction for Verifiable Evaluation), an open-source, parameterized GitHub corpus builder that, unlike repository-level mining tools, works at code granularity: it locates individual functions, methods, and classes in repositories and extracts them as records, giving direct control over corpus construction based on several criteria, including widely used programming languages (Python, Java, JavaScript, C++), repository quality, and creation date. To support software engineering research and LLM evaluation on real-world code, SIEVE extracts CodeSearchNet- and OpenClassGen-compatible records, each annotated with 22 structural metrics and AST-derived features, and optionally with a CodeBERT-based P(AI-generated) score (F1=0.9478,…