Multilingual Twitter Sentiment Classification: The Role of Human Annotators

PLoS One. 2016 May 5;11(5):e0155036. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155036. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

What are the limits of automated Twitter sentiment classification? We analyze a large set of manually labeled tweets in different languages, use them as training data, and construct automated classification models. It turns out that the quality of classification models depends much more on the quality and size of training data than on the type of the model trained. Experimental results indicate that there is no statistically significant difference between the performance of the top classification models. We quantify the quality of training data by applying various annotator agreement measures, and identify the weakest points of different datasets. We show that the model performance approaches the inter-annotator agreement when the size of the training set is sufficiently large. However, it is crucial to regularly monitor the self- and inter-annotator agreements since this improves the training datasets and consequently the model performance. Finally, we show that there is strong evidence that humans perceive the sentiment classes (negative, neutral, and positive) as ordered.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Internet*
  • Multilingualism*

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the European Union projects SIMPOL (no. 610704), MULTIPLEX (no. 317532) and DOLFINS (no. 640772), and by the Slovenian ARRS programme Knowledge Technologies (no. P2-103).