A Comparison of Dictionary Building Methods for Sentiment Analysis in Software Engineering Text

Abstract

Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Software Engineering (SE) texts suffers from low accuracies primarily due to the lack of an effective dictionary. The use of a domain-specific dictionary can improve the accuracy of SA in a particular domain. Building a domain dictionary is not a trivial task. The performance of lexical SA also varies based on the method applied to develop the dictionary. This paper includes a quantitative comparison of four dictionaries representing distinct dictionary building methods to identify which methods have higher/lower potential to perform well in constructing a domain dictionary for SA in SE texts.