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Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment on GitHub
Conference proceeding   Open access

Toxicity Ahead: Forecasting Conversational Derailment on GitHub

Mia Mohammad Imran, Robert Zita, Rahat Rizvi Rahman, Preetha Chatterjee and Kostadin Damevski
Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp 2402-2414
12 Apr 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3744916.3787839
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3744916.3787839View
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Abstract

Software and its engineering -- Open source model Software and its engineering -- Programming teams
Toxic interactions in Open Source Software (OSS) communities reduce contributor engagement and threaten project sustainability. Preventing such toxicity before it emerges requires a clear understanding of how harmful conversations unfold. However, most proactive moderation strategies are manual, requiring significant time and effort from community maintainers. To support more scalable approaches, we curate a dataset of 159 derailed toxic threads and 207 non-toxic threads from GitHub discussions. Our analysis reveals that toxicity can be forecast by tension triggers, sentiment shifts, and specific conversational patterns. We present a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for predicting conversational derailment on GitHub using a two-step prompting pipeline. First, we generate Summaries of Conversation Dynamics (SCDs) via Least-to-Most (LtM) prompting; then we use these summaries to estimate the likelihood of derailment. Evaluated on Qwen and Llama models, our LtM strategy achieves F1-scores of 0.901 and 0.852, respectively, at a decision threshold of 0.3, outperforming established NLP baselines on conversation derailment. External validation on a dataset of 308 GitHub issue threads (65 toxic, 243 non-toxic) yields an F1-score up to 0.797. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of structured LLM prompting for early detection of conversational derailment in OSS, enabling proactive and explainable moderation.

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