Fuzzy ensemble of fined tuned BERT models for domain-specific sentiment analysis of software engineering dataset

Software engineers post their opinions about various topics on social media that can be collectively mined using Sentiment Analysis. Analyzing this opinion is useful because it can provide insight into developers' feedback about various tools and topics. General-purpose sentiment analysis tools do not work well in the software domain because most of these tools are trained on movies and review datasets. Therefore, efforts are underway to develop domain-specific sentiment analysis tools for the Software Engineering (SE) domain. However, existing domain-specific tools for SE struggle to compute negative and neutral sentiments and can not be used on all SE datasets. This work uses a hybrid technique based on deep learning and a fine-tuned BERT model, i.e., Bert-Base, Bert-Large, Bert-LSTM, Bert-GRU, and Bert-CNN presented that is adapted as a domain-specific sentiment analysis tool for Community Question Answering datasets (named as Fuzzy Ensemble). Five different variants of fine-tuned BERT on the SE dataset are developed, and an ensemble of these fine-tuned models is taken using fuzzy logic. The trained model is evaluated on four publicly available benchmark datasets, i.e., Stack Overflow, JavaLib, Jira, and Code Review, using various evaluation metrics. The fuzzy Ensemble model is also compared with the state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tools for the software engineering domain, i.e., SentiStrength-SE, Senti4SD, SentiCR, and Generative Pre-Training Transformer (GPT). GPT mode is fine-tuned by the authors for domain-specific sentiment analysis. The Fuzzy Ensemble model covers the limitation of existing tools and improve accuracy to predict neutral sentiments even on diverse dataset. The fuzzy Ensemble model performs superior to state-of-the-art tools by achieving a maximum F1-score of 0.883.