A Consensus Approach to Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

There are many situations where the opinion of the majority of participants is critical. The scenarios could be multiple, like a number of doctors finding commonality on the diagnosing of an illness or parliament members looking for consensus on a specific law being passed. In this article we present a method that utilises Induced Ordered Weighted Averaging (IOWA) operators to aggregate a majority opinion from a number of Sentiment Analysis (SA) classification systems, where the latter occupy the role usually taken by human decision-makers. Previously determined sentence intensity polarity by different SA classification methods are used as input to a specific IOWA operator. During the experimental phase, the use of the IOWA operator coupled with the linguistic quantifier ‘most’ ($\text {IOWA}_{most}$) proved to yield superior results compared to those achieved when utilising other techniques commonly applied when some sort of averaging is needed, such as arithmetic mean or median techniques.