Motivation

In the recent years, a trend has emerged to study the role of affective states in software development, including personality traits, attitudes, moods, opinions, sentiments, and emotions. Affective computing, i.e., the study  and development of software systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and exploit human affect, has been considered a promising approach. Several requirements engineering tasks include acceptance and negotiation activities in which affect emotions plays a crucial role. For example, from requirements elicitation to negotiation, from modeling to prioritization, different emotions arise and evolve for stakeholders with different personality traits—including the final users.

Currently, contributions in this area lack a dedicated forum. This workshop aims at creating an international and sustainable community where researchers and practitioners interested in the role of affect in requirements engineering can meet, present, and discuss their work-in-progress. The workshop provides an opportunity to reflect on the potential contribution of  affective computing to requirements engineering. We solicit contributions about empirical studies, theoretical models, as well as tools for supporting affective computing in requirements engineering.

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Topics of Interest

This workshop aims at identifying addressing opportunities and  challenges posed by affect recognition and modeling in requirements engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Automatic recognition and impact assessment of affective states, emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits on group collaboration in requirements engineering, including cross-cultural stakeholder teams
• The role of affect in the social requirements platform ecosystems, both from a stakeholder and end-user perspective,
• Techniques to recognize and leverage stakeholders’ affective feedback to improve requirements engineering processes and tools (e.g., capture and analyze the sentiment of end-users community, aspect-based sentiment analysis of product reviews),
• Defining or adapting psychological model of affect to requirements engineering (e.g., understanding the trigger behind positive and negative emotions during the requirement engineering process, modeling coarse vs. fine grained emotion),
• Multimodal recognition of affect of spontaneous communicative behavior such as natural language processing, analysis of body posture and gesture, speech analysis, conversational analysis during stakeholders meetings, use of biometric measurements,
• Affect sensing from communication artifacts (e.g., message boards, issue tracking, social media) and techniques for extracting and summarizing emotions from such channels,
• Software frameworks, APIs, and reusable tools.

Types of Contributions

We invite three types of contributions:

• Full papers (6-8 pages)
• Short position papers (3-4 pages) describe a new idea or work in progress
• Posters, data showcase and demo papers (1-2 pages) summarize a research project, tool, technique or datasets.

These different categories offer researchers who are at different stages in their research maturity the opportunity to benefit from workshop participation. Page limits include references. Empirical evaluations and industrial experience reports are welcome.

Three members from the international program committee will review each submission. Papers will be evaluated based on their originality, relevance to the workshop, and their potential for discussion. The papers with the best reviews will be accepted to be presented in the workshop.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: June 5th
• Papers submission: June 12th
• Acceptance Notification: July 7th

How to Submit

All papers must be in English and must conform, at time of submission, to the ACM formatting instructions. Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format. Submissions should be made through EasyChair.

For formatting instructions, please see here.