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Humans and LLMs struggle with social media sentiment analysis, study finds

A new study published on arXiv evaluates the performance of sentiment analysis tools and large language models (LLMs) on social media texts. The research found that even human annotators exhibit only fair agreement when classifying sentiment, highlighting the inherent subjectivity of the task. Among the evaluated tools, Twitter-roBERTa-base demonstrated the strongest alignment with human ratings, particularly for binary sentiment classification, while LLMs like Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, and Llama-4-Maverick-17B showed moderate to substantial agreement with humans and strong agreement among themselves. AI

IMPACT Highlights the need for domain-specific fine-tuning and human-centered evaluation for reliable social media sentiment analysis.

RANK_REASON Academic paper evaluating LLM and tool performance on a specific task. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Humans and LLMs struggle with social media sentiment analysis, study finds

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Academic paper evaluating LLM and tool performance on a specific task. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Sivakanesan Dhanushkanda, Shuai Hao, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle ·

    Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts

    arXiv:2610.10318v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social media is a rich source of real-time public sentiment, but widely used sentiment analysis tools are often applied without understanding their limitations. In this study, we evaluate the inter-rater reliability of three bespoke…