Electric Vehicle Sentiment Analysis Using Large Language Models

Sentiment analysis is a technique used to understand the public’s opinion towards an event, product, or organization. For example, sentiment analysis can be used to understand positive or negative opinions or attitudes towards electric vehicle (EV) brands. This provides companies with valuable insight into the public’s opinion of their products and brands. In the field of natural language processing (NLP), transformer models have shown great performance compared to traditional machine learning algorithms. However, these models have not been explored extensively in the EV domain. EV companies are becoming significant competitors in the automotive industry and are projected to cover up to 30% of the United States light vehicle market by 2030 In this study, we present a comparative study of large language models (LLMs) including bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), robustly optimised BERT (RoBERTa), and a generalised autoregressive pre-training method (XLNet) using Lucid Motors and Tesla Motors YouTube datasets. Results evidenced that LLMs like BERT and her variants are off-the-shelf algorithms for sentiment analysis, specifically when fine-tuned. Furthermore, our findings present the need for domain adaptation whilst utilizing LLMs. Finally, the experimental results showed that RoBERTa achieved consistent performance across the EV datasets with an F1 score of at least 92%.