Does Punctuation Matter? An Empirical Analysis of Sentiment Tools

In the written text, punctuation is a replacement of the prosody in the speech; it is the most important sign of emotional coloring. In our paper, we explored the role of three pop ular models which include VADER, TextBlob and a BERT-based model in addressing changes in sentiment on the basis of punctuation alone. We created a distinct set of sentences having variant punctuations and annotated each with human sentiment scores to give a direct basis of comparison. The findings revealed that the BERT model was better than the others in the classi f ication of positive and neutral sentiments, however, all the models failed to recognize nuanced emotional changes that occurred because of punctuation like exclamation points and ellipses, especially in the detection of subtle emotions like sarcasm. In general, our research highlights the necessity of including punctuation-sensitive mechanisms to reflect human perception more closely.