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MarValous: machine learning based detection of emotions in the valence-arousal space in software engineering text

Published: 08 April 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Emotion analysis in text has drawn recent interests in the software engineering (SE) community. Existing domain-independent techniques for automated emotion/sentiment analysis perform poorly when operated on SE text. Thus, a few SE domain-specific tools are recently developed for detecting sentimental polarities (e.g., positivity, negativity). But, for capturing individual emotional states such as excitation, stress, depression, and relaxation, there is only one recent tool named DEVA, which uses a lexicon-based approach.
We have developed MarValous, the first Machine Learning based tool for improved detection of the aforementioned emotional states in software engineering text. We evaluate MarValous using a dataset containing 5,122 comments collected from JIRA and Stack Overflow. From a quantitative evaluation, MarValous is found to have substantially outperformed DEVA achieving more than 83% precision and more than 79% recall.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SAC '19: Proceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
    April 2019
    2682 pages
    ISBN:9781450359337
    DOI:10.1145/3297280
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    Published: 08 April 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. arousal
    2. emotion
    3. machine learning
    4. sentiment
    5. valence

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