A Gold Standard for Emotion Annotation in Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a manually annotated dataset of 4,800 Stack Overflow posts for emotions, supporting research on emotion awareness in software engineering communication.

Contribution

It provides a new, publicly available emotion annotation dataset for Stack Overflow content, aiding empirical studies in emotion analysis.

Findings

Created a dataset of 4,800 annotated posts

Supports emotion-aware software engineering research

Facilitates sentiment analysis in developer communication

Abstract

Software developers experience and share a wide range of emotions throughout a rich ecosystem of communication channels. A recent trend that has emerged in empirical software engineering studies is leveraging sentiment analysis of developers' communication traces. We release a dataset of 4,800 questions, answers, and comments from Stack Overflow, manually annotated for emotions. Our dataset contributes to the building of a shared corpus of annotated resources to support research on emotion awareness in software development.