Online meeting applications (apps) have emerged as a potential solution for conferencing, education and meetings, etc. during the COVID-19 outbreak and are used by private companies and governments alike. A large number of such apps compete with each other by providing a different set of functions towards users' satisfaction. These apps take users' feedback in the form of opinions and reviews which are later used to improve the quality of services. Sentiment analysis serves as the key function to obtain and analyze users' sentiments from the posted feedback indicating the importance of efficient and accurate sentiment analysis. This study proposes the novel idea of self voting classification (SVC) where multiple variants of the same model are trained using different feature extraction approaches and the final prediction is based on the ensemble of these variants. For experiments, the data collected from the Google Play store for online meeting apps were used. Primarily, the focus of this study is to use a support vector machine (SVM) with the proposed SVC approach using both soft voting (SV) and hard voting (HV) criteria, however, decision tree, logistic regression, and k nearest neighbor have also been investigated for performance appraisal. Three variants of models are trained on a bag of words, term frequency-inverse document frequency, and hashing features to make the ensemble. Experimental results indicate that the proposed SVC approach can elevate the performance of traditional machine learning models substantially. The SVM obtains 1.00 and 0.98 accuracy scores, using HV and SV criteria, respectively when used with the proposed SVC approach. Topic-wise sentiment analysis using the latent Dirichlet allocation technique is performed as well for topic modeling.
Keywords: Apps reviews; Machine learning; Online meeting applications; Self voting criteria; Sentiment analysis features.
©2022 Aslam et al.