Sentiment is fundamental to human communication. Countless marketing applications mine opinions from social media communication, news articles, customer feedback, or cor-porate communication. Various sentiment analysis methods are available and new ones have recently been proposed. Lexicons can relate individual words and expressions to sen-timent scores. In contrast, machine learning methods are more complex to interpret, but promise higher accuracy, i.e., fewer false classifications. We propose an empirical frame-work and quantify these trade-offs for different types of research questions, data character-istics, and analytical resources to enable informed method decisions contingent on the application context. Based on a meta-analysis of 272 datasets and 12 million sentiment -labeled text documents, we find that the recently proposed transfer learning models indeed perform best, but can perform worse than popular leaderboard benchmarks sug-gest. We quantify the accuracy-interpretability trade-off, showing that, compared to widely established lexicons, transfer learning models on average classify more than 20 per-centage points more documents correctly. To form realistic performance expectations, additional context variables, most importantly the desired number of sentiment classes and the text length, should be taken into account. We provide a pre-trained sentiment analysis model (called SiEBERT) with open-source scripts that can be applied as easily as an off-the-shelf lexicon.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
