Towards discovering the role of emotions in stack overflow

Today, people increasingly try to solve domain-specific problems through interaction on online Question and Answer (Q&A) sites, such as Stack Overflow. The growing success of the Stack Overflow community largely depends on the will of their members to answer others' questions. Recent research has shown that the factors that push members of online communities encompass both social and technical aspects. Yet, we argue that also the emotional style of a technical question does influence the probability of promptly obtaining a satisfying answer. In this paper, we describe the design of an empirical study aimed to investigate the role of affective lexicon on the questions posted in Stack Overflow.