Unveiling factors influencing judgment variation in sentiment analysis with natural language processing and statistics

TripAdvisor reviews and comparable data sources play an important role in many tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), providing a data basis for the identification and classification of subjective judgments, such as hotel or restaurant reviews, into positive or negative polarities. This study explores three important factors influencing variation in crowdsourced polarity judgments, focusing on TripAdvisor reviews in Spanish. Three hypotheses are tested: the role of Part Of Speech (POS), the impact of sentiment words such as “tasty”, and the influence of neutral words like “ok” on judgment variation. The study’s methodology employs one-word titles, demonstrating their efficacy in studying polarity variation of words. Statistical tests on mean equality are performed on word groups of our interest. The results of this study reveal that adjectives in one-word titles tend to result in lower judgment variation compared to other word types or POS. Sentiment words contribute to lower judgment variation as well, emphasizing the significance of sentiment words in research on polarity judgments, and neutral words are associated with higher judgment variation as expected. However, these effects cannot be always reproduced in longer titles, which suggests that longer titles do not represent the best data source for testing the ambiguity of single words due to the influence on word polarity by other words like negation in longer titles. This empirical investigation contributes valuable insights into the factors influencing polarity variation of words, providing a foundation for NLP practitioners that aim to capture and predict polarity judgments in Spanish and for researchers that aim to understand factors influencing judgment variation.