Leveraging encoder-only large language models for mobile app review feature extraction

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwh...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Motger de la Encarnación, Joaquim|||0000-0002-4896-7515, Miaschi, Alessio, Dell’Orletta, Felice, Franch Gutiérrez, Javier|||0000-0001-9733-8830, Marco Gómez, Jordi|||0000-0002-0078-7929
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/432930
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/432930
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10664-025-10660-y
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Mobile app reviews
Feature extraction
Named-entity recognition
Large language models
Extended pre-training
Instance selection
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Enginyeria del software
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Llenguatge natural
Descripción
Sumario:Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that these methods improve the precision and recall of extracted features and enhance performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.