On the Impact of Language Nuances on Sentiment Analysis with Large Language Models: Paraphrasing, Sarcasm, and Emojis

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, including sentiment analysis. However, data quality--particularly when sourced from social media--can significantly impact their accuracy. This research explores how textual nuances, including emojis and sarcasm, affect sentiment analysis, with a particular focus on improving data quality through text paraphrasing techniques. To address the lack of labeled sarcasm data, the authors created a human-labeled dataset of 5929 tweets that enabled the assessment of LLM in various sarcasm contexts. The results show that when topic-specific datasets, such as those related to nuclear power, are used to finetune LLMs these models are not able to comprehend accurate sentiment in presence of sarcasm due to less diverse text, requiring external interventions like sarcasm removal to boost model accuracy. Sarcasm removal led to up to 21% improvement in sentiment accuracy, as LLMs trained on nuclear power-related content struggled with sarcastic tweets, achieving only 30% accuracy. In contrast, LLMs trained on general tweet datasets, covering a broader range of topics, showed considerable improvements in predicting sentiment for sarcastic tweets (60% accuracy), indicating that incorporating general text data can enhance sarcasm detection. The study also utilized adversarial text augmentation, showing that creating synthetic text variants by making minor changes significantly increased model robustness and accuracy for sarcastic tweets (approximately 85%). Additionally, text paraphrasing of tweets with fragmented language transformed around 40% of the tweets with low-confidence labels into high-confidence ones, improving LLMs sentiment analysis accuracy by 6%.