Monitoring Negative Sentiment-Related Events in Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) development is a highly collaborative process where individuals, groups and organizations interact to develop, operate and maintain software and related artifacts. The developers' sentiment in this process can have an impact on their working willingness and efficiency. Monitoring sentiment factors can help to improve OSS development and management. However, no method has been proposed to dynamically monitor the sentiment phenomena during the OSS development process. In this paper, an approach to detect Negative Sentiment-related Events (NSE) is proposed. It consists of two steps. The first step is to identify the burst interval of negative comments from open source projects, which corresponds to a NSE. The second step is to annotate this NSE with its event type. To support this approach, the types of NSEs in OSS projects are defined through an empirical study and classifiers are trained to annotate event types automatically. Moreover, conversation disentanglement techniques are employed to make the comments extracted more complete. Finally, the factors that have an influence on NSEs in the OSS project are studied.