Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2017

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Negative results, Replication study, Sentiment analysis tools

Discipline

Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Empirical Software Engineering

Volume

22

Issue

5

First Page

2543

Last Page

2584

ISSN

1382-3256

Identifier

10.1007/s10664-016-9493-x

Publisher

Springer Verlag (Germany)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9493-x

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