On the Limitations of Combining Sentiment Analysis Tools in a Cross-Platform Setting

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Obaidi, Martin, Holm, Henrik, Schneider, Kurt, Klünder, Jil
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Obaidi, Martin
Holm, Henrik
Schneider, Kurt
Klünder, Jil
author_facet Obaidi, Martin
Holm, Henrik
Schneider, Kurt
Klünder, Jil
contents A positive working climate is essential in modern software development. It enhances productivity since a satisfied developer tends to deliver better results. Sentiment analysis tools are a means to analyze and classify textual communication between developers according to the polarity of the statements. Most of these tools deliver promising results when used with test data from the domain they are developed for (e.g., GitHub). But the tools' outcomes lack reliability when used in a different domain (e.g., Stack Overflow). One possible way to mitigate this problem is to combine different tools trained in different domains. In this paper, we analyze a combination of three sentiment analysis tools in a voting classifier according to their reliability and performance. The tools are trained and evaluated using five already existing polarity data sets (e.g. from GitHub). The results indicate that this kind of combination of tools is a good choice in the within-platform setting. However, a majority vote does not necessarily lead to better results when applying in cross-platform domains. In most cases, the best individual tool in the ensemble is preferable. This is mainly due to the often large difference in performance of the individual tools, even on the same data set. However, this may also be due to the different annotated data sets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06665
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Limitations of Combining Sentiment Analysis Tools in a Cross-Platform Setting
Obaidi, Martin
Holm, Henrik
Schneider, Kurt
Klünder, Jil
Software Engineering
A positive working climate is essential in modern software development. It enhances productivity since a satisfied developer tends to deliver better results. Sentiment analysis tools are a means to analyze and classify textual communication between developers according to the polarity of the statements. Most of these tools deliver promising results when used with test data from the domain they are developed for (e.g., GitHub). But the tools' outcomes lack reliability when used in a different domain (e.g., Stack Overflow). One possible way to mitigate this problem is to combine different tools trained in different domains. In this paper, we analyze a combination of three sentiment analysis tools in a voting classifier according to their reliability and performance. The tools are trained and evaluated using five already existing polarity data sets (e.g. from GitHub). The results indicate that this kind of combination of tools is a good choice in the within-platform setting. However, a majority vote does not necessarily lead to better results when applying in cross-platform domains. In most cases, the best individual tool in the ensemble is preferable. This is mainly due to the often large difference in performance of the individual tools, even on the same data set. However, this may also be due to the different annotated data sets.
title On the Limitations of Combining Sentiment Analysis Tools in a Cross-Platform Setting
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06665