Exploring ChatGPT for Toxicity Detection in GitHub

Abstract

Fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment is crucial for the sustained progress of open source development. However, the prevalence of negative discourse, often manifested as toxic comments, poses significant challenges to developer well-being and productivity. To identify such negativity in project communications, especially within large projects, automated toxicity detection models are necessary. To train these models effectively, we need large software engineering-specific toxicity datasets. However, such datasets are limited in availability and often exhibit imbalance (e.g., only 6 in 1000 GitHub issues are toxic) [1], posing challenges for training effective toxicity detection models. To address this problem, we explore a zero-shot LLM (ChatGPT) that is pre-trained on massive datasets but without being fine-tuned specifically for the task of detecting toxicity in software-related text. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that ChatGPT shows promise in detecting toxicity in GitHub, and warrants further investigation. We experimented with various prompts, including those designed for justifying model outputs, thereby enhancing model interpretability and paving the way for potential integration of ChatGPT-enabled toxicity detection into developer communication channels.