# Bootstrapping a Lexicon for Emotional Arousal in Software Engineering

## TL;DR

This paper introduces SEA, a specialized lexicon for measuring emotional arousal in software engineering, built via bootstrapping from issue data and manual scoring, which helps differentiate issue priorities related to emotional activation.

## Contribution

The paper presents the first software engineering-specific arousal lexicon, SEA, created through a novel bootstrapping method combining word embeddings and manual scoring.

## Key findings

- SEA differentiates issue priorities effectively
- Combining SEA with Warriner et al.'s lexicon improves performance
- Achieves Cohen's d effect sizes up to 0.5

## Abstract

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.

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1703.09046