An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of an Ensemble of Stand-alone Sentiment Detection Tools for Software Engineering Datasets

An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of an Ensemble of Stand-alone Sentiment Detection Tools for Software Engineering Datasets. Uddin, G., Gu�h�neuc, Y., Khomh, F., & Roy, C. Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 31(3):1–38, ACM Press, April, 2022. 37 pages.

Paper abstract bibtex

Sentiment analysis in software engineering (SE) has shown promise to analyze and support diverse development activities. Recently, several tools are proposed to detect sentiments in software artifacts. While the tools improve accuracy over off-the-shelf tools, recent research shows that their performance could still be unsatisfactory. A more accurate sentiment detector for SE can help reduce noise in analysis of software scenarios where sentiment analysis is required. Recently, combinations, i.e., hybrids of stand-alone classifiers are found to offer better performance than the stand-alone classifiers for fault detection. However, we are aware of no such approach for sentiment detection for software artifacts. We report the results of an empirical study that we conducted to determine the feasibility of developing an ensemble engine by combining the polarity labels of stand-alone SE-specific sentiment detectors. Our study has two phases. In the first phase, we pick five SE-specific sentiment detection tools from two recently published papers by Lin et al., who first reported negative results with stand alone sentiment detectors and then proposed an improved SE-specific sentiment detector, POME. We report the study results on 17,581 units (sentences/documents) coming from six currently available sentiment benchmarks for software engineering. We find that the existing tools can be complementary to each other in 85-95\NOof the cases, i.e., one is wrong but another is right. However, a majority voting-based ensemble of those tools fails to improve the accuracy of sentiment detection. We develop Sentisead, a supervised tool by combining the polarity labels and bag of words as features. Sentisead improves the performance (F1-score) of the individual tools by 4\NO(over Senti4SD) – 100\NO(over POME). The initial development of Sentisead occurred before we observed the use of deep learning models for SE-specific sentiment detection. In particular, recent papers show the superiority of advanced language-based pre-trained transformer models (PTM) over rule-based and shallow learning models. Consequently, in a second phase, we compare and improve Sentisead infrastructure using the PTMs. We find that a Sentisead infrastructure with RoBERTa as the ensemble of the five stand-alone rule-based and shallow learning SE-specific tools from Lin et al.\ offers the best F1-score of 0.805 across the six datasets, while a stand-alone RoBERTa shows an F1-score of 0.801.

@ARTICLE{Uddin22-TOSEM-CombinedSentiments,
   AUTHOR       = {Gias Uddin and Yann-Ga�l Gu�h�neuc and Foutse Khomh and 
      Chanchal Roy},
   JOURNAL      = {Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)},
   TITLE        = {An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of an Ensemble 
      of Stand-alone Sentiment Detection Tools for Software Engineering 
      Datasets},
   YEAR         = {2022},
   MONTH        = {April},
   NOTE         = {37 pages.},
   NUMBER       = {3},
   PAGES        = {1--38},
   VOLUME       = {31},
   EDITOR       = {Mauro Pezze},
   KEYWORDS     = {Topic: <b>Program comprehension</b>, 
      Venue: <b>TOSEM</b>},
   PUBLISHER    = {ACM Press},
   URL          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/TOSEM21.doc.pdf},
   ABSTRACT     = {Sentiment analysis in software engineering (SE) has 
      shown promise to analyze and support diverse development activities. 
      Recently, several tools are proposed to detect sentiments in software 
      artifacts. While the tools improve accuracy over off-the-shelf tools, 
      recent research shows that their performance could still be 
      unsatisfactory. A more accurate sentiment detector for SE can help 
      reduce noise in analysis of software scenarios where sentiment 
      analysis is required. Recently, combinations, i.e., hybrids of 
      stand-alone classifiers are found to offer better performance than 
      the stand-alone classifiers for fault detection. However, we are 
      aware of no such approach for sentiment detection for software 
      artifacts. We report the results of an empirical study that we 
      conducted to determine the feasibility of developing an ensemble 
      engine by combining the polarity labels of stand-alone SE-specific 
      sentiment detectors. Our study has two phases. In the first phase, we 
      pick five SE-specific sentiment detection tools from two recently 
      published papers by Lin et al., who first reported negative results 
      with stand alone sentiment detectors and then proposed an improved 
      SE-specific sentiment detector, POME. We report the study results on 
      17,581 units (sentences/documents) coming from six currently 
      available sentiment benchmarks for software engineering. We find that 
      the existing tools can be complementary to each other in 85-95\NOof 
      the cases, i.e., one is wrong but another is right. However, a 
      majority voting-based ensemble of those tools fails to improve the 
      accuracy of sentiment detection. We develop Sentisead, a supervised 
      tool by combining the polarity labels and bag of words as features. 
      Sentisead improves the performance (F1-score) of the individual tools 
      by 4\NO(over Senti4SD) -- 100\NO(over POME). The initial development 
      of Sentisead occurred before we observed the use of deep learning 
      models for SE-specific sentiment detection. In particular, recent 
      papers show the superiority of advanced language-based pre-trained 
      transformer models (PTM) over rule-based and shallow learning models. 
      Consequently, in a second phase, we compare and improve Sentisead 
      infrastructure using the PTMs. We find that a Sentisead 
      infrastructure with RoBERTa as the ensemble of the five stand-alone 
      rule-based and shallow learning SE-specific tools from Lin et al.\ 
      offers the best F1-score of 0.805 across the six datasets, while a 
      stand-alone RoBERTa shows an F1-score of 0.801.}
}

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Recently, several tools are proposed to detect sentiments in software artifacts. While the tools improve accuracy over off-the-shelf tools, recent research shows that their performance could still be unsatisfactory. A more accurate sentiment detector for SE can help reduce noise in analysis of software scenarios where sentiment analysis is required. Recently, combinations, i.e., hybrids of stand-alone classifiers are found to offer better performance than the stand-alone classifiers for fault detection. However, we are aware of no such approach for sentiment detection for software artifacts. We report the results of an empirical study that we conducted to determine the feasibility of developing an ensemble engine by combining the polarity labels of stand-alone SE-specific sentiment detectors. Our study has two phases. In the first phase, we pick five SE-specific sentiment detection tools from two recently published papers by Lin et al., who first reported negative results with stand alone sentiment detectors and then proposed an improved SE-specific sentiment detector, POME. We report the study results on 17,581 units (sentences/documents) coming from six currently available sentiment benchmarks for software engineering. We find that the existing tools can be complementary to each other in 85-95\\NOof the cases, i.e., one is wrong but another is right. However, a majority voting-based ensemble of those tools fails to improve the accuracy of sentiment detection. We develop Sentisead, a supervised tool by combining the polarity labels and bag of words as features. Sentisead improves the performance (F1-score) of the individual tools by 4\\NO(over Senti4SD) – 100\\NO(over POME). 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