Understanding Emojis in Useful Code Review Comments

Sharif Ahmed, Nasir U. Eisty

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Emojis and emoticons serve as non-verbal cues and are increasingly prevalent across various platforms, including Modern Code Review. These cues often carry emotive or instructive weight for developers. Our study dives into the utility of Code Review comments (CR comments) by scrutinizing the sentiments and semantics conveyed by emojis within these comments. To assess the usefulness of CR comments, we augment traditional 'textual' features and pre-Trained embeddings with 'emoji-specific' features and pre-Trained embeddings. To fortify our inquiry, we expand an existing dataset with emoji annotations, guided by existing research on GitHub emoji usage, and re-evaluate the CR comments accordingly. Our models, which incorporate textual and emoji-based sentiment features and semantic understandings of emojis, substantially outperform baseline metrics. The often-overlooked emoji elements in CR comments emerge as key indicators of usefulness, suggesting that these symbols carry significant weight.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2024 ACM/IEEE International Workshop on NL-Based Software Engineering, NLBSE 2024
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages81-84
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9798400705762
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event3rd ACM/IEEE International Workshop on NL-Based Software Engineering, NLBSE 2024 - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 20 Apr 2024 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2024 ACM/IEEE International Workshop on NL-Based Software Engineering, NLBSE 2024

Conference

Conference3rd ACM/IEEE International Workshop on NL-Based Software Engineering, NLBSE 2024
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period20/04/24 → …

Keywords

  • Code Review Comment
  • Emoji
  • Sentiment
  • Usefulness

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Understanding Emojis in Useful Code Review Comments'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this