Ethical Classification of Non-Coding Contributions in Open-Source Projects via Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cobos, Sergio, Izquierdo, Javier Luis Cánovas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cobos, Sergio
Izquierdo, Javier Luis Cánovas
author_facet Cobos, Sergio
Izquierdo, Javier Luis Cánovas
contents The development of Open-Source Software (OSS) is not only a technical challenge, but also a social one due to the diverse mixture of contributors. To this aim, social-coding platforms, such as GitHub, provide the infrastructure needed to host and develop the code, but also the support for enabling the community's collaboration, which is driven by non-coding contributions, such as issues (i.e., change proposals or bug reports) or comments to existing contributions. As with any other social endeavor, this development process faces ethical challenges, which may put at risk the project's sustainability. To foster a productive and positive environment, OSS projects are increasingly deploying codes of conduct, which define rules to ensure a respectful and inclusive participatory environment, with the Contributor Covenant being the main model to follow. However, monitoring and enforcing these codes of conduct is a challenging task, due to the limitations of current approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to classify the ethical quality of non-coding contributions in OSS projects by relying on Large Language Models (LLM), a promising technology for text classification tasks. We defined a set of ethical metrics based on the Contributor Covenant and developed a classification approach to assess ethical behavior in OSS non-coding contributions, using prompt engineering to guide the model's output.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21583
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ethical Classification of Non-Coding Contributions in Open-Source Projects via Large Language Models
Cobos, Sergio
Izquierdo, Javier Luis Cánovas
Software Engineering
The development of Open-Source Software (OSS) is not only a technical challenge, but also a social one due to the diverse mixture of contributors. To this aim, social-coding platforms, such as GitHub, provide the infrastructure needed to host and develop the code, but also the support for enabling the community's collaboration, which is driven by non-coding contributions, such as issues (i.e., change proposals or bug reports) or comments to existing contributions. As with any other social endeavor, this development process faces ethical challenges, which may put at risk the project's sustainability. To foster a productive and positive environment, OSS projects are increasingly deploying codes of conduct, which define rules to ensure a respectful and inclusive participatory environment, with the Contributor Covenant being the main model to follow. However, monitoring and enforcing these codes of conduct is a challenging task, due to the limitations of current approaches. In this paper, we propose an approach to classify the ethical quality of non-coding contributions in OSS projects by relying on Large Language Models (LLM), a promising technology for text classification tasks. We defined a set of ethical metrics based on the Contributor Covenant and developed a classification approach to assess ethical behavior in OSS non-coding contributions, using prompt engineering to guide the model's output.
title Ethical Classification of Non-Coding Contributions in Open-Source Projects via Large Language Models
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21583