Evaluating Pre-Trained Models for User Feedback Analysis in Software Engineering: A Study on Classification of App-Reviews
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Abstract (arXiv)
Context: Mobile app reviews written by users on app stores or social media are significant resources for app developers.Analyzing app reviews have proved to be useful for many areas of software engineering (e.g., requirement engineering, testing). Automatic classification of app reviews requires extensive efforts to manually curate a labeled dataset. When the classification purpose changes (e.g. identifying bugs versus usability issues or sentiment), new datasets should be labeled, which prevents the extensibility of the developed models for new desired classes/tasks in practice. Recent pre-trained neural language models (PTM) are trained on large corpora in an unsupervised manner and have found success in solving similar Natural Language Processing problems. However, the applicability of PTMs is not explored for app review classification Objective: We investigate the benefits of PTMs for app review classification compared to the existing models, as well as the transferability of PTMs in multiple settings. Method: We empirically study the accuracy and time efficiency of PTMs compared to prior approaches using six datasets from literature. In addition, we investigate the performance of the PTMs trained on app reviews (i.e. domain-specific PTMs) . We set up different studies to evaluate PTMs in multiple settings: binary vs. multi-class classification, zero-shot classification (when new labels are introduced to the model), multi-task setting, and classification of reviews from different resources. The datasets are manually labeled app review datasets from Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and Twitter data. In all cases, Micro and Macro Precision, Recall, and F1-scores will be used and we will report the time required for training and prediction with the models.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 59 of its 176 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Apr 2021.
Builds on
59 of 176 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 1; 2024: 0; 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
7 papers.
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- 2025RAGVA: Engineering Retrieval Augmented Generation-based Virtual Assistants in Practicecited by 6
- 2022Pre-Trained Neural Language Models for Automatic Mobile App User Feedback Answer Generationcited by 2
- 2023APIContext2Com: Code Comment Generation by Incorporating Pre-Defined API Documentationcited by 2
- 2025Exploring Zero-Shot App Review Classification with ChatGPT: Challenges and Potentialcited by 1
- 2026Age Matters: Analyzing Age-Related Discussions in App Reviewscited by 0
- 2026From Reviews to Requirements: Can LLMs Generate Human-Like User Stories?cited by 0
- 2026From Reviews to Requirements: Can LLMs Generate Human-Like User Stories?30 Mar 2026
- 2026Age Matters: Analyzing Age-Related Discussions in App Reviews29 Jan 2026
- 2025Exploring Zero-Shot App Review Classification with ChatGPT: Challenges and Potential7 May 2025
- 2025RAGVA: Engineering Retrieval Augmented Generation-based Virtual Assistants in Practice20 Feb 2025
- 2023APIContext2Com: Code Comment Generation by Incorporating Pre-Defined API Documentation3 Mar 2023
- 2022On the Effectiveness of Pretrained Models for API Learning5 Apr 2022
- 2022Pre-Trained Neural Language Models for Automatic Mobile App User Feedback Answer Generation4 Feb 2022