Interpretation of Sentiment Analysis with Human-in-the-Loop

Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning community. It is essential to realize the advantages of human feedback and the pressing need for manual annotation to improve machine learning performance. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and use these complex source texts to broaden our understanding of human sentiment using the human-in-the-loop approach. This paper presents our understanding of how human annotators differ from machine annotators in sentiment analysis tasks and how these differences can contribute to designing systems for the "human in the loop" sentiment analysis in complex, unstructured texts. We further explore the challenges and benefits of the human-machine collaboration for sentiment analysis using a case study in Greek tragedy and address some open questions about collaborative annotation for sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected six popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, including VADER, CoreNLP's sentiment annotator, TextBlob, LIME, Glove+LSTM, and RoBERTa. We have conducted a qualitative and quantitative evaluation with the human-in-the-loop approach and confirmed our observations on sentiment tasks using the Greek tragedy case study.