Ensemble Methods For App Review Classification: An Approach For Software Evolution

App marketplaces are distribution platforms for mobile applications that serve as a communication channel between users and developers. These platforms allow users to write reviews about downloaded apps. Recent studies found that such reviews include information that is useful for software evolution. However, the manual analysis of a large amount of user reviews is a tedious and time consuming task. In this work we propose a taxonomy for classifying app reviews into categories relevant for software evolution. Additionally, we describe an experiment that investigates the performance of individual machine learning algorithms and its ensembles for automatically classifying the app reviews. We evaluated the performance of the machine learning techniques on 4550 reviews that were systematically labeled using content analysis methods. Overall, the ensembles had a better performance than the individual classifiers, with an average precision of 0.74 and 0.59 recall.