Bootstrapping a Lexicon for Emotional Arousal in Software Engineering
This addresses the problem of monitoring emotional arousal to prevent burnout in software developers, though it's incremental as it builds on existing lexicon methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of measuring emotional arousal in software engineering by creating the first Software Engineering Arousal lexicon (SEA) using a bootstrapping approach. They showed it can differentiate between issue priorities with Cohen's d effect sizes up to 0.5 when combined with an existing general-purpose lexicon.
Emotional arousal increases activation and performance but may also lead to burnout in software development. We present the first version of a Software Engineering Arousal lexicon (SEA) that is specifically designed to address the problem of emotional arousal in the software developer ecosystem. SEA is built using a bootstrapping approach that combines word embedding model trained on issue-tracking data and manual scoring of items in the lexicon. We show that our lexicon is able to differentiate between issue priorities, which are a source of emotional activation and then act as a proxy for arousal. The best performance is obtained by combining SEA (428 words) with a previously created general purpose lexicon by Warriner et al. (13,915 words) and it achieves Cohen's d effect sizes up to 0.5.