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’ (IOWAmost) 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.