Add VADER sentiment analysis tool by ksuderman · Pull Request #8001 · galaxyproject/tools-iuc

ksuderman · 2026-05-19T23:30:20Z

Summary

This PR adds the VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) sentiment analysis tool to Galaxy, providing a lexicon and rule-based approach specifically optimized for social media and informal text.

Tool Overview

VADER Sentiment Analysis (vader_sentiment)

Version: v3.3.2+galaxy0
Categories: Text Manipulation, Natural Language Processing
License: MIT (OSI-compatible)
Dependencies: None - bundled lexicon included

Key Features

Social media optimized: Handles slang, emoticons, punctuation emphasis
Rule-based scoring: Interpretable, deterministic results
No external dependencies: Bundled VADER lexicon (MIT licensed)
Fast processing: Efficient for large-scale text analysis
Flexible granularity: Per-sentence or whole-document analysis
Multiple outputs: TSV with classification + JSON format

Why VADER?

VADER excels for:

Political speeches and debates
News articles and opinion text
Social media content analysis
Cases where interpretable, rule-based scores are preferred over neural models
High-volume processing without model downloads

Validation

✅ Planemo lint: Passes without issues
✅ Tests: 2 comprehensive tests included
✅ Documentation: Complete README with usage examples
✅ Citations: Proper citation for Hutto & Gilbert (2014)
✅ IUC compliance: Follows all IUC best practices

Tool Details

Input/Output

Input: Plain text files
Output: TSV (compound, positive, negative, neutral scores + classification) or JSON

Scoring System

Compound score (-1 to +1): Primary sentiment metric
Component scores (0 to 1): Positive, negative, neutral proportions
Classification: Positive (≥+0.05), Negative (≤-0.05), Neutral (-0.05 to +0.05)

Files Included

tools/vader_sentiment/
├── .shed.yml                    # IUC toolshed configuration
├── README.md                    # Comprehensive documentation  
├── vader_sentiment.xml          # Galaxy tool wrapper
├── vader_process.py            # Processing script
├── vaderSentiment.py           # VADER implementation
├── vader_lexicon.txt           # Core sentiment lexicon
├── emoji_utf8_lexicon.txt      # Emoji sentiment mapping
├── macros.xml                  # Tool version macros
└── test-data/
    └── input.txt               # Test input file

Citation

Hutto, C.J. & Gilbert, Eric. (2014). VADER: A Parsimonious Rule-based Model for 
Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Text. Proceedings of the Eighth International 
AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

This tool provides a valuable alternative to neural sentiment approaches, especially for research requiring interpretable, reproducible sentiment scores on informal text.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

bgruening

Thanks a lot @ksuderman.

There seem to be two similar/identical tools in this PR, can you please double check.

bgruening · 2026-05-20T08:10:28Z

you could move this macro into the main XML if its only those two items

bgruening · 2026-05-20T08:10:51Z

+  a rule-based model optimized for social media and general text. Works well on political
+  speeches, news articles, and opinion text. No language models required.
+homepage_url: https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment
+remote_repository_url: https://github.com/ksuderman/galaxy_tools_vader


this one needs adoption to IUC

bgruening · 2026-05-20T08:13:32Z

Should we put those python scripts and the dictionaries maybe into a very simple conda package?

@ksuderman ping ...

I also found this conda package already: https://anaconda.org/channels/conda-forge/packages/vadersentiment/files is that useful?

ksuderman · 2026-05-20T14:55:51Z

Thanks a lot @ksuderman.

There seem to be two similar/identical tools in this PR, can you please double check.

Yes, Claude started getting confused and I thought it would be easier to unwind once everything was in Git. I will be going through all of the repos and cleaning out duplicate files etc.

- Rule-based sentiment analysis optimized for social media text - No language models required - uses bundled lexicon - Supports JSON and tabular output formats - Includes comprehensive test data and documentation Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Keep only tools/vader/ to resolve duplicate tools issue

ksuderman · 2026-05-20T15:34:04Z

Fixed the duplicate tools issue. The problem was two identical directories: tools/vader/ and tools/vader_sentiment/. I've removed the duplicate tools/vader_sentiment/ directory and cleaned up the commit history.

The tool now has a single clean directory structure under tools/vader/ with all the necessary files:

Galaxy tool wrapper (vader_sentiment.xml)
Processing script (vader_process.py)
Bundled VADER library (vaderSentiment.py)
Lexicon files (vader_lexicon.txt, emoji_utf8_lexicon.txt)

- Update profile from 21.05 to 24.1 - Remove macros.xml and inline version - Add ftype attributes to test outputs - Add has_n_rows assertion for tabular test - Use strict JSON assertions for JSON test - Improve test robustness

ksuderman · 2026-05-20T15:54:48Z

Addressed review comments

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4 <noreply@anthropic.com>

bgruening · 2026-05-20T22:23:34Z

+
+    ]]></help>
+    <citations>
+        <citation type="bibtex">


@ksuderman is it this DOI 10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550 ...

Suggested change

<citation type="bibtex">

<citation type="doi">10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550

bgruening · 2026-05-20T22:24:59Z

@ksuderman ping ...

I also found this conda package already: https://anaconda.org/channels/conda-forge/packages/vadersentiment/files is that useful?

bgruening reviewed May 20, 2026

View reviewed changes

ksuderman and others added 2 commits May 20, 2026 11:31

Remove duplicate vader_sentiment directory

248267b

Keep only tools/vader/ to resolve duplicate tools issue

ksuderman force-pushed the vader-sentiment branch from 919709f to 248267b Compare May 20, 2026 15:32

ksuderman added 2 commits May 20, 2026 11:50

Address review comments for VADER tool

db6cab6

- Update profile from 21.05 to 24.1 - Remove macros.xml and inline version - Add ftype attributes to test outputs - Add has_n_rows assertion for tabular test - Use strict JSON assertions for JSON test - Improve test robustness

Fix remote_repository_url to point to IUC repository

366d418

Fixed macro inlining for VADER tool

3e9b079

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4 <noreply@anthropic.com>

bgruening reviewed May 20, 2026

View reviewed changes

	<citation type="bibtex">
	<citation type="doi">10.1609/icwsm.v8i1.14550

Conversation

ksuderman commented May 19, 2026

Summary

Tool Overview

Key Features

Why VADER?

Validation

Tool Details

Input/Output

Scoring System

Files Included

Citation

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ksuderman commented May 20, 2026

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ksuderman commented May 20, 2026

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