Sentiment Analysis Tools in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Obaidi, Martin, Nagel, Lukas, Specht, Alexander, Klünder, Jil
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Obaidi, Martin
Nagel, Lukas
Specht, Alexander
Klünder, Jil
author_facet Obaidi, Martin
Nagel, Lukas
Specht, Alexander
Klünder, Jil
contents Software development is a collaborative task. Previous research has shown social aspects within development teams to be highly relevant for the success of software projects. A team's mood has been proven to be particularly important. It is paramount for project managers to be aware of negative moods within their teams, as such awareness enables them to intervene. Sentiment analysis tools offer a way to determine the mood of a team based on textual communication. We aim to help developers or stakeholders in their choice of sentiment analysis tools for their specific purpose. Therefore, we conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS). We present the results of our SMS of sentiment analysis tools developed for or applied in the context of software engineering (SE). Our results summarize insights from 106 papers with respect to (1) the application domain, (2) the purpose, (3) the used data sets, (4) the approaches for developing sentiment analysis tools, (5) the usage of already existing tools, and (6) the difficulties researchers face. We analyzed in more detail which tools and approaches perform how in terms of their performance. According to our results, sentiment analysis is frequently applied to open-source software projects, and most approaches are neural networks or support-vector machines. The best performing approach in our analysis is neural networks and the best tool is BERT. Despite the frequent use of sentiment analysis in SE, there are open issues, e.g. regarding the identification of irony or sarcasm, pointing to future research directions. We conducted an SMS to gain an overview of the current state of sentiment analysis in order to help developers or stakeholders in this matter. Our results include interesting findings e.g. on the used tools and their difficulties. We present several suggestions on how to solve these identified problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07893
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sentiment Analysis Tools in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
Obaidi, Martin
Nagel, Lukas
Specht, Alexander
Klünder, Jil
Software Engineering
Software development is a collaborative task. Previous research has shown social aspects within development teams to be highly relevant for the success of software projects. A team's mood has been proven to be particularly important. It is paramount for project managers to be aware of negative moods within their teams, as such awareness enables them to intervene. Sentiment analysis tools offer a way to determine the mood of a team based on textual communication. We aim to help developers or stakeholders in their choice of sentiment analysis tools for their specific purpose. Therefore, we conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS). We present the results of our SMS of sentiment analysis tools developed for or applied in the context of software engineering (SE). Our results summarize insights from 106 papers with respect to (1) the application domain, (2) the purpose, (3) the used data sets, (4) the approaches for developing sentiment analysis tools, (5) the usage of already existing tools, and (6) the difficulties researchers face. We analyzed in more detail which tools and approaches perform how in terms of their performance. According to our results, sentiment analysis is frequently applied to open-source software projects, and most approaches are neural networks or support-vector machines. The best performing approach in our analysis is neural networks and the best tool is BERT. Despite the frequent use of sentiment analysis in SE, there are open issues, e.g. regarding the identification of irony or sarcasm, pointing to future research directions. We conducted an SMS to gain an overview of the current state of sentiment analysis in order to help developers or stakeholders in this matter. Our results include interesting findings e.g. on the used tools and their difficulties. We present several suggestions on how to solve these identified problems.
title Sentiment Analysis Tools in Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07893