Uncovering the Causes of Emotions in Software Developer Communication Using Zero-shot LLMs
Mia Mohammad Imran, Preetha Chatterjee, Kostadin Damevski
Abstract
Understanding and identifying the causes behind developers' emotions (e.g., Frustration caused by 'delays in merging pull requests') can be crucial towards finding solutions to problems and fostering collaboration in open-source communities. Effectively identifying such information in the high volume of communications across the different project channels, such as chats, emails, and issue comments, requires automated recognition of emotions and their causes. To enable this automation, large-scale software engineering-specific datasets that can be used to train accurate machine learning models are required. However, such datasets are expensive to create with the variety and informal nature of software projects' communication channels.