An Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Symbolic-Lexicon Framework for Multi-Domain Sentiment Classification

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63158/journalisi.v8i5.1872

Keywords:

multi-domain sentiment classification, selective prediction, deferment, domain shift, lexicon adaptation, rough-set evidence, algorithmic traceability

Abstract

Multi-domain sentiment classifiers may return a polarity label even when the evidence behind that decision becomes fragile under domain shift. This study evaluates an uncertainty-aware hybrid symbolic-lexicon framework designed to pair each polarity prediction with a traceable accept-or-defer status. The framework combines a lexical branch adapted only on training data with training-only fitted symbolic feature states, variable-precision rough evidence, and nested score fusion. Evaluation uses the UCI Sentiment Labelled Sentences dataset, comprising 3,000 balanced English sentences from Amazon Cells, IMDb, and Yelp, under repeated within-source, pooled multi-domain, and leave-one-source-out protocols. In pooled evaluation, the framework achieved 83.73% accuracy and 83.76% F1-score, improving F1 by 0.50 points over the adaptive lexical branch. The boundary mechanism deferred 53.55% of cases and retained 92.54% accuracy among accepted predictions; however, matched-coverage logistic regression and SVM confidence rankings produced lower selective risk. The contribution is therefore a reproducible, algorithmically traceable polarity-and-deferment mechanism rather than a claim of universal predictive or uncertainty-ranking superiority.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

[1] M. Wankhade, A. C. S. Rao, and C. Kulkarni, "A survey on sentiment analysis methods, applications, and challenges," Artif. Intell. Rev., vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 5731–5780, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1007/s10462-022-10144-1.

[2] K. Alahmadi, S. Alharbi, J. Chen, et al., "Generalizing sentiment analysis: A review of progress, challenges, and emerging directions," Soc. Netw. Anal. Min., vol. 15, no. 1, 2025, doi: 10.1007/s13278-025-01461-8.

[3] S. Wang, J. Zhou, Q. Chen, Q. Zhang, T. Gui, and X. Huang, "Domain generalization via causal adjustment for cross-domain sentiment analysis," pp. 5286–5298, 2024, arXiv: 2402.14536.

[4] D. Xin, K. Zhao, J. Sun, and Y. Li, “CDA²: Counterfactual diffusion augmentation for cross-domain adaptation in low-resource sentiment analysis,” in Proc. 31st Int. Conf. Comput. Linguistics, Jan. 2025, pp. 61–72.

[5] W. Zhang, Y. Deng, B. Liu, et al., "Sentiment analysis in the era of large language models: A reality check," in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pp. 3881–3906, 2024, doi: 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.246.

[6] G. Xie, Y. Zhang, J. Bao, et al., "Comprehensive and efficient distillation for lightweight sentiment analysis models," in Proc. 2025 Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 22070–22091, 2025, doi: 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1122.

[7] D. Herrera-Poyatos, C. Peláez-González, C. Zuheros, A. Herrera-Poyatos, V. Tejedor, F. Herrera, and R. Montes, "An overview of model uncertainty and variability in LLM-based sentiment analysis: Challenges, mitigation strategies, and the role of explainability," Front. Artif. Intell., 2025, doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1609097.

[8] C. J. Hutto and E. Gilbert, "VADER: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text," in Proc. 8th Int. AAAI Conf. Web and Social Media, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 216–225, 2014, doi: 10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550.

[9] K. Barik and S. Misra, "Analysis of customer reviews with an improved VADER lexicon classifier," J. Big Data, vol. 11, no. 1, art. no. 10, 2024, doi: 10.1186/s40537-023-00861-x.

[10] Z. Pawlak, "Rough sets," Int. J. Comput. Inf. Sci., vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 341–356, 1982.

[11] W. Ziarko, "Variable precision rough set model," J. Comput. Syst. Sci., vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 39–59, 1993.

[12] Y. Geifman and R. El-Yaniv, "SelectiveNet: A deep neural network with an integrated reject option," in Proc. 36th Int. Conf. Machine Learning, PMLR, vol. 97, 2019, arXiv: 1901.09192.

[13] C. Guo, G. Pleiss, Y. Sun, and K. Q. Weinberger, "On calibration of modern neural networks," in Proc. 34th Int. Conf. Machine Learning, PMLR, vol. 70, pp. 1321–1330, 2017.

[14] Y. Ovadia, E. Fertig, J. Ren, et al., "Can you trust your model's uncertainty? Evaluating predictive uncertainty under dataset shift," in Proc. 33rd Conf. Neural Information Processing Systems, 2019, arXiv: 1906.02530.

[15] A. N. Angelopoulos and S. Bates, "Conformal prediction: A gentle introduction," Found. Trends Mach. Learn., 2023, doi: 10.1561/2200000101.

[16] K. Gunaratne, S. Kobourov, and J. A. Miller, "Class angular distortion index for dimensionality reduction," Comput. Graph. Forum, 2026, doi: 10.1111/cgf.70465.

[17] D. Kotzias, M. Denil, N. de Freitas, et al., "From group to individual labels using deep features," in Proc. 21st ACM SIGKDD Int. Conf. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 597–606, 2015, doi: 10.1145/2783258.2783380.

[18] S. Kapoor and A. Narayanan, "Leakage and the reproducibility crisis in machine-learning-based science," Patterns, vol. 4, no. 9, art. no. 100804, 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.patter.2023.100804.

[19] J. Pineau, P. Vincent-Lamarre, K. Sinha, et al., "Improving reproducibility in machine learning research (A report from the NeurIPS 2019 reproducibility program)," J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 22, pp. 1–20, 2021.

[20] M. Ock, N. Yi, J. Ahn, and M. Jo, "How many alternatives can be ranked? A comparison of the paired comparison and ranking methods," Value Health, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 655–660, 2016, doi: 10.1016/j.jval.2016.03.1836.

[21] S. Holm, "A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure," Scand. J. Statist., vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 65–70, 1979.

[22] A. Ramponi and B. Plank, "Neural unsupervised domain adaptation in NLP — A survey," in Proc. 28th Int. Conf. Computational Linguistics, pp. 6838–6855, 2020, doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.603.

[23] K. Zhou, Z. Liu, Y. Qiao, T. Xiang, and C. C. Loy, "Domain generalization: A survey," IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 2022, doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3195549.

[24] A. Jacovi and Y. Goldberg, "Towards faithfully interpretable NLP systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?," in Proc. 58th Annu. Meeting Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 4198–4205, 2020, doi: 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.386.

[25] Q. Lyu, M. Apidianaki, and C. Callison-Burch, "Towards faithful model explanation in NLP: A survey," Comput. Linguist., 2024, doi: 10.1162/coli_a_00511.

[26] V. Sanh, L. Debut, J. Chaumond, and T. Wolf, "DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: Smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter," arXiv: 1910.01108, 2019.

[27] W. Wang, F. Wei, L. Dong, et al., "MiniLM: Deep self-attention distillation for task-agnostic compression of pre-trained transformers," in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020.

Downloads

Published

2026-10-24

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

[1]
S. Yaakub, M. M. Deris, and I. S. Windiarti, “An Uncertainty-Aware Hybrid Symbolic-Lexicon Framework for Multi-Domain Sentiment Classification”, journalisi, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 6325–6346, Oct. 2026, doi: 10.63158/journalisi.v8i5.1872.