CMER: A Context-Aware Approach for Mining Ethical Concern-related App Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the increasing proliferation of mobile applications in our daily lives, the concerns surrounding ethics have surged significantly. Users communicate their feedback in app reviews, frequently emphasizing ethical concerns, such as privacy and security. Incorporating these reviews has proved to be useful for many areas of software engineering (e.g., requirement engineering, testing, etc.). However, app reviews related to ethical concerns generally use domain-specific language and are typically overshadowed by more generic categories of user feedback, such as app reliability and usability. Thus, making automated extraction a challenging and time-consuming effort.This study proposes CMER (A Context-Aware Approach for Mining Ethical Concern-related App Reviews), a novel approach that combines Natural Language Inference (NLI) and a decoder-only (LLaMA-like) Large Language Model (LLM) to extract ethical concern-related app reviews at scale. In CMER, NLI provides domain-specific context awareness by using domain-specific hypotheses, and the Llama-like LLM eliminates the need for labeled data in the classification task. We evaluated the validity of CMER by mining privacy and security-related reviews (PSRs) from the dataset of more than 382K app reviews of mobile investment apps. First, we evaluated four NLI models and compared the results of domain-specific hypotheses with generic hypotheses. Next, we evaluated three LLMs for the classification task. Finally, we combined the best NLI and LLM models (CMER) and extracted 2,178 additional PSRs overlooked by the previous study using a keyword-based approach, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of CMER. These reviews can be further refined into actionable requirement artifacts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".