On negative results when using sentiment analysis tools for software engineering research

Recent years have seen an increasing attention to social aspects of software engineering, including studies of emotions and sentiments experienced and expressed by the software developers. Most of these studies reuse existing sentiment analysis tools such as SentiStrength and NLTK . However, these t...

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Veröffentlicht in:Empirical software engineering : an international journal Jg. 22; H. 5; S. 2543 - 2584
Hauptverfasser: Jongeling, Robbert, Sarkar, Proshanta, Datta, Subhajit, Serebrenik, Alexander
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York Springer US 01.10.2017
Springer Nature B.V
Schlagworte:
Compilers
Computer Science
Contrarian investing
Data mining
Engineering research
Interpreters
Product reviews
Programming Languages
Sentiment analysis
Social factors
Software
Software engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Studies
Negative results
Replication study
Sentiment analysis tools
ISSN:1382-3256, 1573-7616
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Zusammenfassung:Recent years have seen an increasing attention to social aspects of software engineering, including studies of emotions and sentiments experienced and expressed by the software developers. Most of these studies reuse existing sentiment analysis tools such as SentiStrength and NLTK . However, these tools have been trained on product reviews and movie reviews and, therefore, their results might not be applicable in the software engineering domain. In this paper we study whether the sentiment analysis tools agree with the sentiment recognized by human evaluators (as reported in an earlier study) as well as with each other. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of the choice of a sentiment analysis tool on software engineering studies by conducting a simple study of differences in issue resolution times for positive, negative and neutral texts. We repeat the study for seven datasets (issue trackers and Stack Overflow questions) and different sentiment analysis tools and observe that the disagreement between the tools can lead to diverging conclusions. Finally, we perform two replications of previously published studies and observe that the results of those studies cannot be confirmed when a different sentiment analysis tool is used.
Bibliographie:ObjectType-Article-1
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ISSN:1382-3256
1573-7616
DOI:10.1007/s10664-016-9493-x