Emotion Classification In Software Engineering Texts: A Comparative Analysis of Pre-trained Transformers Language Models

Emotion recognition in software engineering texts is critical for understanding developer expressions and improving collaboration. This paper presents a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art Pretrained Language Models (PTMs) for fine-grained emotion classification on two benchmark datasets from GitHub and Stack Overflow We evaluate six transformer models - BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, DeBERTa, CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT against the current best-performing tool SEntiMoji. Our analysis reveals consistent improvements ranging from $1.17 \%$ to $16.79 \%$ in terms of macroaveraged and micro-averaged F1 scores, with general domain models outperforming specialized ones. To further enhance PTMs, we incorporate polarity features in attention layer during training demonstrating additional average gains of $1.0 \%$ to $10.23 \%$ over baseline PTMs approaches. Our work provides strong evidence for the advancements afforded by PTMs in recognizing nuanced emotions like Anger, Love, Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Surprise in software engineering contexts. Through comprehensive benchmarking and error analysis, we also outline scope for improvements to address contextual gaps.