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Oct 5

Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Models with Progressive Self-supervised Attention Learning

In aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), many neural models are equipped with an attention mechanism to quantify the contribution of each context word to sentiment prediction. However, such a mechanism suffers from one drawback: only a few frequent words with sentiment polarities are tended to be taken into consideration for final sentiment decision while abundant infrequent sentiment words are ignored by models. To deal with this issue, we propose a progressive self-supervised attention learning approach for attentional ABSA models. In this approach, we iteratively perform sentiment prediction on all training instances, and continually learn useful attention supervision information in the meantime. During training, at each iteration, context words with the highest impact on sentiment prediction, identified based on their attention weights or gradients, are extracted as words with active/misleading influence on the correct/incorrect prediction for each instance. Words extracted in this way are masked for subsequent iterations. To exploit these extracted words for refining ABSA models, we augment the conventional training objective with a regularization term that encourages ABSA models to not only take full advantage of the extracted active context words but also decrease the weights of those misleading words. We integrate the proposed approach into three state-of-the-art neural ABSA models. Experiment results and in-depth analyses show that our approach yields better attention results and significantly enhances the performance of all three models. We release the source code and trained models at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/PSSAttention.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 4, 2021

SEntFiN 1.0: Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Financial News

Fine-grained financial sentiment analysis on news headlines is a challenging task requiring human-annotated datasets to achieve high performance. Limited studies have tried to address the sentiment extraction task in a setting where multiple entities are present in a news headline. In an effort to further research in this area, we make publicly available SEntFiN 1.0, a human-annotated dataset of 10,753 news headlines with entity-sentiment annotations, of which 2,847 headlines contain multiple entities, often with conflicting sentiments. We augment our dataset with a database of over 1,000 financial entities and their various representations in news media amounting to over 5,000 phrases. We propose a framework that enables the extraction of entity-relevant sentiments using a feature-based approach rather than an expression-based approach. For sentiment extraction, we utilize 12 different learning schemes utilizing lexicon-based and pre-trained sentence representations and five classification approaches. Our experiments indicate that lexicon-based n-gram ensembles are above par with pre-trained word embedding schemes such as GloVe. Overall, RoBERTa and finBERT (domain-specific BERT) achieve the highest average accuracy of 94.29% and F1-score of 93.27%. Further, using over 210,000 entity-sentiment predictions, we validate the economic effect of sentiments on aggregate market movements over a long duration.

  • 4 authors
·
May 20, 2023

UniSent: Universal Adaptable Sentiment Lexica for 1000+ Languages

In this paper, we introduce UniSent universal sentiment lexica for 1000+ languages. Sentiment lexica are vital for sentiment analysis in absence of document-level annotations, a very common scenario for low-resource languages. To the best of our knowledge, UniSent is the largest sentiment resource to date in terms of the number of covered languages, including many low resource ones. In this work, we use a massively parallel Bible corpus to project sentiment information from English to other languages for sentiment analysis on Twitter data. We introduce a method called DomDrift to mitigate the huge domain mismatch between Bible and Twitter by a confidence weighting scheme that uses domain-specific embeddings to compare the nearest neighbors for a candidate sentiment word in the source (Bible) and target (Twitter) domain. We evaluate the quality of UniSent in a subset of languages for which manually created ground truth was available, Macedonian, Czech, German, Spanish, and French. We show that the quality of UniSent is comparable to manually created sentiment resources when it is used as the sentiment seed for the task of word sentiment prediction on top of embedding representations. In addition, we show that emoticon sentiments could be reliably predicted in the Twitter domain using only UniSent and monolingual embeddings in German, Spanish, French, and Italian. With the publication of this paper, we release the UniSent sentiment lexica.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 21, 2019

SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 27, 2023

FinDPO: Financial Sentiment Analysis for Algorithmic Trading through Preference Optimization of LLMs

Opinions expressed in online finance-related textual data are having an increasingly profound impact on trading decisions and market movements. This trend highlights the vital role of sentiment analysis as a tool for quantifying the nature and strength of such opinions. With the rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI), supervised fine-tuned (SFT) large language models (LLMs) have become the de facto standard for financial sentiment analysis. However, the SFT paradigm can lead to memorization of the training data and often fails to generalize to unseen samples. This is a critical limitation in financial domains, where models must adapt to previously unobserved events and the nuanced, domain-specific language of finance. To this end, we introduce FinDPO, the first finance-specific LLM framework based on post-training human preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). The proposed FinDPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard sentiment classification benchmarks, outperforming existing supervised fine-tuned models by 11% on the average. Uniquely, the FinDPO framework enables the integration of a fine-tuned causal LLM into realistic portfolio strategies through a novel 'logit-to-score' conversion, which transforms discrete sentiment predictions into continuous, rankable sentiment scores (probabilities). In this way, simulations demonstrate that FinDPO is the first sentiment-based approach to maintain substantial positive returns of 67% annually and strong risk-adjusted performance, as indicated by a Sharpe ratio of 2.0, even under realistic transaction costs of 5 basis points (bps).

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 24, 2025

Paralinguistics-Enhanced Large Language Modeling of Spoken Dialogue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior abilities in tasks such as chatting, reasoning, and question-answering. However, standard LLMs may ignore crucial paralinguistic information, such as sentiment, emotion, and speaking style, which are essential for achieving natural, human-like spoken conversation, especially when such information is conveyed by acoustic cues. We therefore propose Paralinguistics-enhanced Generative Pretrained Transformer (ParalinGPT), an LLM that utilizes text and speech modalities to better model the linguistic content and paralinguistic attributes of spoken dialogue. The model takes the conversational context of text, speech embeddings, and paralinguistic attributes as input prompts within a serialized multitasking multimodal framework. Specifically, our framework serializes tasks in the order of current paralinguistic attribute prediction, response paralinguistic attribute prediction, and response text generation with autoregressive conditioning. We utilize the Switchboard-1 corpus, including its sentiment labels as the paralinguistic attribute, as our spoken dialogue dataset. Experimental results indicate the proposed serialized multitasking method outperforms typical sequence classification techniques on current and response sentiment classification. Furthermore, leveraging conversational context and speech embeddings significantly improves both response text generation and sentiment prediction. Our proposed framework achieves relative improvements of 6.7%, 12.0%, and 3.5% in current sentiment accuracy, response sentiment accuracy, and response text BLEU score, respectively.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 23, 2023

TANGNN: a Concise, Scalable and Effective Graph Neural Networks with Top-m Attention Mechanism for Graph Representation Learning

In the field of deep learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformer models, with their outstanding performance and flexible architectural designs, have become leading technologies for processing structured data, especially graph data. Traditional GNNs often face challenges in capturing information from distant vertices effectively. In contrast, Graph Transformer models are particularly adept at managing long-distance node relationships. Despite these advantages, Graph Transformer models still encounter issues with computational and storage efficiency when scaled to large graph datasets. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture that integrates a Top-m attention mechanism aggregation component and a neighborhood aggregation component, effectively enhancing the model's ability to aggregate relevant information from both local and extended neighborhoods at each layer. This method not only improves computational efficiency but also enriches the node features, facilitating a deeper analysis of complex graph structures. Additionally, to assess the effectiveness of our proposed model, we have applied it to citation sentiment prediction, a novel task previously unexplored in the GNN field. Accordingly, we constructed a dedicated citation network, ArXivNet. In this dataset, we specifically annotated the sentiment polarity of the citations (positive, neutral, negative) to enable in-depth sentiment analysis. Our approach has shown superior performance across a variety of tasks including vertex classification, link prediction, sentiment prediction, graph regression, and visualization. It outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness, as demonstrated by experimental results on multiple datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 23, 2024

Supercharging Agenda Setting Research: The ParlaCAP Dataset of 28 European Parliaments and a Scalable Multilingual LLM-Based Classification

This paper introduces ParlaCAP, a large-scale dataset for analyzing parliamentary agenda setting across Europe, and proposes a cost-effective method for building domain-specific policy topic classifiers. Applying the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) schema to the multilingual ParlaMint corpus of over 8 million speeches from 28 parliaments of European countries and autonomous regions, we follow a teacher-student framework in which a high-performing large language model (LLM) annotates in-domain training data and a multilingual encoder model is fine-tuned on these annotations for scalable data annotation. We show that this approach produces a classifier tailored to the target domain. Agreement between the LLM and human annotators is comparable to inter-annotator agreement among humans, and the resulting model outperforms existing CAP classifiers trained on manually-annotated but out-of-domain data. In addition to the CAP annotations, the ParlaCAP dataset offers rich speaker and party metadata, as well as sentiment predictions coming from the ParlaSent multilingual transformer model, enabling comparative research on political attention and representation across countries. We illustrate the analytical potential of the dataset with three use cases, examining the distribution of parliamentary attention across policy topics, sentiment patterns in parliamentary speech, and gender differences in policy attention.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 18

Stock Market Prediction Using Node Transformer Architecture Integrated with BERT Sentiment Analysis

Stock market prediction presents considerable challenges for investors, financial institutions, and policymakers operating in complex market environments characterized by noise, non-stationarity, and behavioral dynamics. Traditional forecasting methods, including fundamental analysis and technical indicators, often fail to capture the intricate patterns and cross-sectional dependencies inherent in financial markets. This paper presents an integrated framework combining a node transformer architecture with BERT-based sentiment analysis for stock price forecasting. The proposed model represents the stock market as a graph structure where individual stocks form nodes and edges capture relationships including sectoral affiliations, correlated price movements, and supply chain connections. A fine-tuned BERT model extracts sentiment information from social media posts and combines it with quantitative market features through attention-based fusion mechanisms. The node transformer processes historical market data while capturing both temporal evolution and cross-sectional dependencies among stocks. Experiments conducted on 20 S&P 500 stocks spanning January 1982 to March 2025 demonstrate that the integrated model achieves a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.80% for one-day-ahead predictions, compared to 1.20% for ARIMA and 1.00% for LSTM. The inclusion of sentiment analysis reduces prediction error by 10% overall and 25% during earnings announcements, while the graph-based architecture contributes an additional 15% improvement by capturing inter-stock dependencies. Directional accuracy reaches 65% for one-day forecasts. Statistical validation through paired t-tests confirms the significance of these improvements (p < 0.05 for all comparisons). The model maintains lower error during high-volatility periods, achieving MAPE of 1.50% while baseline models range from 1.60% to 2.10%.

  • 3 authors
·
May 13

ReviewGraph: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Based Framework for Review Rating Prediction with Sentiment Features

In the hospitality industry, understanding the factors that drive customer review ratings is critical for improving guest satisfaction and business performance. This work proposes ReviewGraph for Review Rating Prediction (RRP), a novel framework that transforms textual customer reviews into knowledge graphs by extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples and associating sentiment scores. Using graph embeddings (Node2Vec) and sentiment features, the framework predicts review rating scores through machine learning classifiers. We compare ReviewGraph performance with traditional NLP baselines (such as Bag of Words, TF-IDF, and Word2Vec) and large language models (LLMs), evaluating them in the HotelRec dataset. In comparison to the state of the art literature, our proposed model performs similar to their best performing model but with lower computational cost (without ensemble). While ReviewGraph achieves comparable predictive performance to LLMs and outperforms baselines on agreement-based metrics such as Cohen's Kappa, it offers additional advantages in interpretability, visual exploration, and potential integration into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. This work highlights the potential of graph-based representations for enhancing review analytics and lays the groundwork for future research integrating advanced graph neural networks and fine-tuned LLM-based extraction methods. We will share ReviewGraph output and platform open-sourced on our GitHub page https://github.com/aaronlifenghan/ReviewGraph

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Bitcoin Price Direction Prediction via Regime-Aware Multi-Modal Fusion of Social Sentiment and Technical Features

Bitcoin price prediction on sub-daily timescales is a hard open problem in computational finance. Bitcoin exhibits fat-tailed returns, non-stationary dynamics, and a price discovery process influenced by social discourse on Reddit and Twitter. Conventional approaches fuse OHLCV technical features with sentiment via static concatenation, applying identical fusion weights regardless of market state. This is inconsistent with the behavioural finance literature, which shows that retail sentiment is most predictive during volatile periods and noisy during calm ones. This paper proposes Regime-Aware Multi-Modal Learning (RAML), which conditions fusion of sentiment and price features on a dynamically detected binary market regime. Rolling 24-hour volatility partitions observations into stable and volatile regimes; a learnable sigmoid gate adjusts the weight of the sentiment embedding relative to the price embedding, trusting sentiment more during volatility and price dynamics more during stable phases. The system is evaluated on 3,491 hourly observations (July 2024-September 2025), combining Bitcoin OHLCV data with Reddit /r/Bitcoin FinBERT sentiment. Four models are compared - price-only BiLSTM, sentiment-only classifier, static-concatenation BiLSTM, and RAML - across 3-hour and 6-hour horizons, with an ablation study isolating the sentiment branch, regime detection, and adaptive fusion. RAML achieves macro-F1 of 0.5474 (3h) and 0.5513 (6h), with the highest AUC at 3 hours (0.5084), indicating better calibration. Ablation confirms every component is necessary, and replacing adaptive weighting with concatenation causes recall collapse at 6 hours (F1: 0.14). These results establish regime-conditioned adaptive fusion as a necessary design principle for multi-modal financial forecasting.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 24 2

Mamba Outpaces Reformer in Stock Prediction with Sentiments from Top Ten LLMs

The stock market is extremely difficult to predict in the short term due to high market volatility, changes caused by news, and the non-linear nature of the financial time series. This research proposes a novel framework for improving minute-level prediction accuracy using semantic sentiment scores from top ten different large language models (LLMs) combined with minute interval intraday stock price data. We systematically constructed a time-aligned dataset of AAPL news articles and 1-minute Apple Inc. (AAPL) stock prices for the dates of April 4 to May 2, 2025. The sentiment analysis was achieved using the DeepSeek-V3, GPT variants, LLaMA, Claude, Gemini, Qwen, and Mistral models through their APIs. Each article obtained sentiment scores from all ten LLMs, which were scaled to a [0, 1] range and combined with prices and technical indicators like RSI, ROC, and Bollinger Band Width. Two state-of-the-art such as Reformer and Mamba were trained separately on the dataset using the sentiment scores produced by each LLM as input. Hyper parameters were optimized by means of Optuna and were evaluated through a 3-day evaluation period. Reformer had mean squared error (MSE) or the evaluation metrics, and it should be noted that Mamba performed not only faster but also better than Reformer for every LLM across the 10 LLMs tested. Mamba performed best with LLaMA 3.3--70B, with the lowest error of 0.137. While Reformer could capture broader trends within the data, the model appeared to over smooth sudden changes by the LLMs. This study highlights the potential of integrating LLM-based semantic analysis paired with efficient temporal modeling to enhance real-time financial forecasting.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 13, 2025

Unimodal Training-Multimodal Prediction: Cross-modal Federated Learning with Hierarchical Aggregation

Multimodal learning has seen great success mining data features from multiple modalities with remarkable model performance improvement. Meanwhile, federated learning (FL) addresses the data sharing problem, enabling privacy-preserved collaborative training to provide sufficient precious data. Great potential, therefore, arises with the confluence of them, known as multimodal federated learning. However, limitation lies in the predominant approaches as they often assume that each local dataset records samples from all modalities. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by proposing an Unimodal Training - Multimodal Prediction (UTMP) framework under the context of multimodal federated learning. We design HA-Fedformer, a novel transformer-based model that empowers unimodal training with only a unimodal dataset at the client and multimodal testing by aggregating multiple clients' knowledge for better accuracy. The key advantages are twofold. Firstly, to alleviate the impact of data non-IID, we develop an uncertainty-aware aggregation method for the local encoders with layer-wise Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling. Secondly, to overcome the challenge of unaligned language sequence, we implement a cross-modal decoder aggregation to capture the hidden signal correlation between decoders trained by data from different modalities. Our experiments on popular sentiment analysis benchmarks, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate that HA-Fedformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal models under the UTMP federated learning frameworks, with 15%-20% improvement on most attributes.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 27, 2023

DLF: Disentangled-Language-Focused Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) leverages heterogeneous modalities, such as language, vision, and audio, to enhance the understanding of human sentiment. While existing models often focus on extracting shared information across modalities or directly fusing heterogeneous modalities, such approaches can introduce redundancy and conflicts due to equal treatment of all modalities and the mutual transfer of information between modality pairs. To address these issues, we propose a Disentangled-Language-Focused (DLF) multimodal representation learning framework, which incorporates a feature disentanglement module to separate modality-shared and modality-specific information. To further reduce redundancy and enhance language-targeted features, four geometric measures are introduced to refine the disentanglement process. A Language-Focused Attractor (LFA) is further developed to strengthen language representation by leveraging complementary modality-specific information through a language-guided cross-attention mechanism. The framework also employs hierarchical predictions to improve overall accuracy. Extensive experiments on two popular MSA datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate the significant performance gains achieved by the proposed DLF framework. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the feature disentanglement module, language-focused attractor, and hierarchical predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/pwang322/DLF.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

A Robust Predictive Model for Stock Price Prediction Using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

Prediction of future movement of stock prices has been a subject matter of many research work. There is a gamut of literature of technical analysis of stock prices where the objective is to identify patterns in stock price movements and derive profit from it. Improving the prediction accuracy remains the single most challenge in this area of research. We propose a hybrid approach for stock price movement prediction using machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. We select the NIFTY 50 index values of the National Stock Exchange of India, and collect its daily price movement over a period of three years (2015 to 2017). Based on the data of 2015 to 2017, we build various predictive models using machine learning, and then use those models to predict the closing value of NIFTY 50 for the period January 2018 till June 2019 with a prediction horizon of one week. For predicting the price movement patterns, we use a number of classification techniques, while for predicting the actual closing price of the stock, various regression models have been used. We also build a Long and Short-Term Memory - based deep learning network for predicting the closing price of the stocks and compare the prediction accuracies of the machine learning models with the LSTM model. We further augment the predictive model by integrating a sentiment analysis module on twitter data to correlate the public sentiment of stock prices with the market sentiment. This has been done using twitter sentiment and previous week closing values to predict stock price movement for the next week. We tested our proposed scheme using a cross validation method based on Self Organizing Fuzzy Neural Networks and found extremely interesting results.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 9, 2019

SentiBench - a benchmark comparison of state-of-the-practice sentiment analysis methods

In the last few years thousands of scientific papers have investigated sentiment analysis, several startups that measure opinions on real data have emerged and a number of innovative products related to this theme have been developed. There are multiple methods for measuring sentiments, including lexical-based and supervised machine learning methods. Despite the vast interest on the theme and wide popularity of some methods, it is unclear which one is better for identifying the polarity (i.e., positive or negative) of a message. Accordingly, there is a strong need to conduct a thorough apple-to-apple comparison of sentiment analysis methods, as they are used in practice, across multiple datasets originated from different data sources. Such a comparison is key for understanding the potential limitations, advantages, and disadvantages of popular methods. This article aims at filling this gap by presenting a benchmark comparison of twenty-four popular sentiment analysis methods (which we call the state-of-the-practice methods). Our evaluation is based on a benchmark of eighteen labeled datasets, covering messages posted on social networks, movie and product reviews, as well as opinions and comments in news articles. Our results highlight the extent to which the prediction performance of these methods varies considerably across datasets. Aiming at boosting the development of this research area, we open the methods' codes and datasets used in this article, deploying them in a benchmark system, which provides an open API for accessing and comparing sentence-level sentiment analysis methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 13, 2016

Multimodal LLMs See Sentiment

Understanding how visual content conveys sentiment is increasingly important in a digital landscape dominated by imagery. However, sentiment perception depends on complex scene-level semantics, making this a challenging task for computational models. This paper examines how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform sentiment analysis in images through a systematic, evaluation-driven study encompassing three perspectives: (i) direct sentiment classification from images using MLLMs; (ii) sentiment analysis on MLLM-generated descriptions using pre-trained LLMs; and (iii) fine-tuning these LLMs on sentiment-labeled descriptions to assess performance and generalization. Experiments on a recent benchmark show that a two-stage MLLM description-mediated pipeline can substantially improve prediction accuracy under several evaluation settings, particularly when the LLM component is fine-tuned. Across different agreement thresholds and sentiment granularities, the strongest configurations of this pipeline outperform lexicon-, CNN-, and Transformer-based baselines in our benchmark by up to 30.9%, 64.8%, and 42.4%, respectively. In cross-dataset evaluation, the proposed pipeline - without training or fine-tuning on the target dataset - still surpasses the best in-domain baseline by over 8%. Overall, the study provides a comprehensive assessment of MLLM description-mediated sentiment analysis, clarifying the conditions under which it is effective, the scenarios in which it fails, and its comparison with traditional vision-based approaches, while also providing a reproducible benchmark resource for future research.

  • 6 authors
·
May 26

Removing Non-Stationary Knowledge From Pre-Trained Language Models for Entity-Level Sentiment Classification in Finance

Extraction of sentiment signals from news text, stock message boards, and business reports, for stock movement prediction, has been a rising field of interest in finance. Building upon past literature, the most recent works attempt to better capture sentiment from sentences with complex syntactic structures by introducing aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC). Despite the growing interest, however, fine-grained sentiment analysis has not been fully explored in non-English literature due to the shortage of annotated finance-specific data. Accordingly, it is necessary for non-English languages to leverage datasets and pre-trained language models (PLM) of different domains, languages, and tasks to best their performance. To facilitate finance-specific ASC research in the Korean language, we build KorFinASC, a Korean aspect-level sentiment classification dataset for finance consisting of 12,613 human-annotated samples, and explore methods of intermediate transfer learning. Our experiments indicate that past research has been ignorant towards the potentially wrong knowledge of financial entities encoded during the training phase, which has overestimated the predictive power of PLMs. In our work, we use the term "non-stationary knowledge'' to refer to information that was previously correct but is likely to change, and present "TGT-Masking'', a novel masking pattern to restrict PLMs from speculating knowledge of the kind. Finally, through a series of transfer learning with TGT-Masking applied we improve 22.63% of classification accuracy compared to standalone models on KorFinASC.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2023

BESSTIE: A Benchmark for Sentiment and Sarcasm Classification for Varieties of English

Despite large language models (LLMs) being known to exhibit bias against non-mainstream varieties, there are no known labeled datasets for sentiment analysis of English. To address this gap, we introduce BESSTIE, a benchmark for sentiment and sarcasm classification for three varieties of English: Australian (en-AU), Indian (en-IN), and British (en-UK). Using web-based content from two domains, namely, Google Place reviews and Reddit comments, we collect datasets for these language varieties using two methods: location-based and topic-based filtering. Native speakers of the language varieties manually annotate the datasets with sentiment and sarcasm labels. To assess whether the dataset accurately represents these varieties, we conduct two validation steps: (a) manual annotation of language varieties and (b) automatic language variety prediction. Subsequently, we fine-tune nine large language models (LLMs) (representing a range of encoder/decoder and mono/multilingual models) on these datasets, and evaluate their performance on the two tasks. Our results reveal that the models consistently perform better on inner-circle varieties (i.e., en-AU and en-UK), with significant performance drops for en-IN, particularly in sarcasm detection. We also report challenges in cross-variety generalisation, highlighting the need for language variety-specific datasets such as ours. BESSTIE promises to be a useful evaluative benchmark for future research in equitable LLMs, specifically in terms of language varieties. The BESSTIE datasets, code, and models will be publicly available upon acceptance.

unswnlporg UNSW NLP
·
Dec 5, 2024

Reducing Spurious Correlations for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Variational Information Bottleneck and Contrastive Learning

Deep learning techniques have dominated the literature on aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), yielding state-of-the-art results. However, these deep models generally suffer from spurious correlation problems between input features and output labels, which creates significant barriers to robustness and generalization capability. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive Variational Information Bottleneck framework (called CVIB) to reduce spurious correlations for ABSA. The proposed CVIB framework is composed of an original network and a self-pruned network, and these two networks are optimized simultaneously via contrastive learning. Concretely, we employ the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle to learn an informative and compressed network (self-pruned network) from the original network, which discards the superfluous patterns or spurious correlations between input features and prediction labels. Then, self-pruning contrastive learning is devised to pull together semantically similar positive pairs and push away dissimilar pairs, where the representations of the anchor learned by the original and self-pruned networks respectively are regarded as a positive pair while the representations of two different sentences within a mini-batch are treated as a negative pair. To verify the effectiveness of our CVIB method, we conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark ABSA datasets and the experimental results show that our approach achieves better performance than the strong competitors in terms of overall prediction performance, robustness, and generalization.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 5, 2023

The MuSe 2022 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge: Humor, Emotional Reactions, and Stress

The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2022 is dedicated to multimodal sentiment and emotion recognition. For this year's challenge, we feature three datasets: (i) the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset that contains audio-visual recordings of German football coaches, labelled for the presence of humour; (ii) the Hume-Reaction dataset in which reactions of individuals to emotional stimuli have been annotated with respect to seven emotional expression intensities, and (iii) the Ulm-Trier Social Stress Test (Ulm-TSST) dataset comprising of audio-visual data labelled with continuous emotion values (arousal and valence) of people in stressful dispositions. Using the introduced datasets, MuSe 2022 2022 addresses three contemporary affective computing problems: in the Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor), spontaneous humour has to be recognised; in the Emotional Reactions Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Reaction), seven fine-grained `in-the-wild' emotions have to be predicted; and in the Emotional Stress Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Stress), a continuous prediction of stressed emotion values is featured. The challenge is designed to attract different research communities, encouraging a fusion of their disciplines. Mainly, MuSe 2022 targets the communities of audio-visual emotion recognition, health informatics, and symbolic sentiment analysis. This baseline paper describes the datasets as well as the feature sets extracted from them. A recurrent neural network with LSTM cells is used to set competitive baseline results on the test partitions for each sub-challenge. We report an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of .8480 for MuSe-Humor; .2801 mean (from 7-classes) Pearson's Correlations Coefficient for MuSe-Reaction, as well as .4931 Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) and .4761 for valence and arousal in MuSe-Stress, respectively.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 23, 2022

State-Regularized Recurrent Neural Networks to Extract Automata and Explain Predictions

Recurrent neural networks are a widely used class of neural architectures. They have, however, two shortcomings. First, they are often treated as black-box models and as such it is difficult to understand what exactly they learn as well as how they arrive at a particular prediction. Second, they tend to work poorly on sequences requiring long-term memorization, despite having this capacity in principle. We aim to address both shortcomings with a class of recurrent networks that use a stochastic state transition mechanism between cell applications. This mechanism, which we term state-regularization, makes RNNs transition between a finite set of learnable states. We evaluate state-regularized RNNs on (1) regular languages for the purpose of automata extraction; (2) non-regular languages such as balanced parentheses and palindromes where external memory is required; and (3) real-word sequence learning tasks for sentiment analysis, visual object recognition and text categorisation. We show that state-regularization (a) simplifies the extraction of finite state automata that display an RNN's state transition dynamic; (b) forces RNNs to operate more like automata with external memory and less like finite state machines, which potentiality leads to a more structural memory; (c) leads to better interpretability and explainability of RNNs by leveraging the probabilistic finite state transition mechanism over time steps.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 9, 2022

Are you SURE? Enhancing Multimodal Pretraining with Missing Modalities through Uncertainty Estimation

Multimodal learning has demonstrated incredible successes by integrating diverse data sources, yet it often relies on the availability of all modalities - an assumption that rarely holds in real-world applications. Pretrained multimodal models, while effective, struggle when confronted with small-scale and incomplete datasets (i.e., missing modalities), limiting their practical applicability. Previous studies on reconstructing missing modalities have overlooked the reconstruction's potential unreliability, which could compromise the quality of the final outputs. We present SURE (Scalable Uncertainty and Reconstruction Estimation), a novel framework that extends the capabilities of pretrained multimodal models by introducing latent space reconstruction and uncertainty estimation for both reconstructed modalities and downstream tasks. Our method is architecture-agnostic, reconstructs missing modalities, and delivers reliable uncertainty estimates, improving both interpretability and performance. SURE introduces a unique Pearson Correlation-based loss and applies statistical error propagation in deep networks for the first time, allowing precise quantification of uncertainties from missing data and model predictions. Extensive experiments across tasks such as sentiment analysis, genre classification, and action recognition show that SURE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, ensuring robust predictions even in the presence of incomplete data.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 17, 2025

tagE: Enabling an Embodied Agent to Understand Human Instructions

Natural language serves as the primary mode of communication when an intelligent agent with a physical presence engages with human beings. While a plethora of research focuses on natural language understanding (NLU), encompassing endeavors such as sentiment analysis, intent prediction, question answering, and summarization, the scope of NLU directed at situations necessitating tangible actions by an embodied agent remains limited. The inherent ambiguity and incompleteness inherent in natural language present challenges for intelligent agents striving to decipher human intention. To tackle this predicament head-on, we introduce a novel system known as task and argument grounding for Embodied agents (tagE). At its core, our system employs an inventive neural network model designed to extract a series of tasks from complex task instructions expressed in natural language. Our proposed model adopts an encoder-decoder framework enriched with nested decoding to effectively extract tasks and their corresponding arguments from these intricate instructions. These extracted tasks are then mapped (or grounded) to the robot's established collection of skills, while the arguments find grounding in objects present within the environment. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our system, we have curated a dataset featuring complex instructions. The results of our experiments underscore the prowess of our approach, as it outperforms robust baseline models.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

FNSPID: A Comprehensive Financial News Dataset in Time Series

Financial market predictions utilize historical data to anticipate future stock prices and market trends. Traditionally, these predictions have focused on the statistical analysis of quantitative factors, such as stock prices, trading volumes, inflation rates, and changes in industrial production. Recent advancements in large language models motivate the integrated financial analysis of both sentiment data, particularly market news, and numerical factors. Nonetheless, this methodology frequently encounters constraints due to the paucity of extensive datasets that amalgamate both quantitative and qualitative sentiment analyses. To address this challenge, we introduce a large-scale financial dataset, namely, Financial News and Stock Price Integration Dataset (FNSPID). It comprises 29.7 million stock prices and 15.7 million time-aligned financial news records for 4,775 S&P500 companies, covering the period from 1999 to 2023, sourced from 4 stock market news websites. We demonstrate that FNSPID excels existing stock market datasets in scale and diversity while uniquely incorporating sentiment information. Through financial analysis experiments on FNSPID, we propose: (1) the dataset's size and quality significantly boost market prediction accuracy; (2) adding sentiment scores modestly enhances performance on the transformer-based model; (3) a reproducible procedure that can update the dataset. Completed work, code, documentation, and examples are available at github.com/Zdong104/FNSPID. FNSPID offers unprecedented opportunities for the financial research community to advance predictive modeling and analysis.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 8, 2024

RooseBERT: A New Deal For Political Language Modelling

The increasing amount of political debates and politics-related discussions calls for the definition of novel computational methods to automatically analyse such content with the final goal of lightening up political deliberation to citizens. However, the specificity of the political language and the argumentative form of these debates (employing hidden communication strategies and leveraging implicit arguments) make this task very challenging, even for current general-purpose pre-trained Language Models. To address this issue, we introduce a novel pre-trained Language Model for political discourse language called RooseBERT. Pre-training a language model on a specialised domain presents different technical and linguistic challenges, requiring extensive computational resources and large-scale data. RooseBERT has been trained on large political debate and speech corpora (8K debates, each composed of several sub-debates on different topics) in English. To evaluate its performances, we fine-tuned it on four downstream tasks related to political debate analysis, i.e., named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, argument component detection and classification, and argument relation prediction and classification. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over general-purpose Language Models on these four tasks, highlighting how domain-specific pre-training enhances performance in political debate analysis. We release the RooseBERT language model for the research community.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

Sinhala Sentence Embedding: A Two-Tiered Structure for Low-Resource Languages

In the process of numerically modeling natural languages, developing language embeddings is a vital step. However, it is challenging to develop functional embeddings for resource-poor languages such as Sinhala, for which sufficiently large corpora, effective language parsers, and any other required resources are difficult to find. In such conditions, the exploitation of existing models to come up with an efficacious embedding methodology to numerically represent text could be quite fruitful. This paper explores the effectivity of several one-tiered and two-tiered embedding architectures in representing Sinhala text in the sentiment analysis domain. With our findings, the two-tiered embedding architecture where the lower-tier consists of a word embedding and the upper-tier consists of a sentence embedding has been proven to perform better than one-tier word embeddings, by achieving a maximum F1 score of 88.04% in contrast to the 83.76% achieved by word embedding models. Furthermore, embeddings in the hyperbolic space are also developed and compared with Euclidean embeddings in terms of performance. A sentiment data set consisting of Facebook posts and associated reactions have been used for this research. To effectively compare the performance of different embedding systems, the same deep neural network structure has been trained on sentiment data with each of the embedding systems used to encode the text associated.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25, 2022

Towards Universal Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings

We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence embeddings based on supervision from the Paraphrase Database (Ganitkevitch et al., 2013). We compare six compositional architectures, evaluating them on annotated textual similarity datasets drawn both from the same distribution as the training data and from a wide range of other domains. We find that the most complex architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks, perform best on the in-domain data. However, in out-of-domain scenarios, simple architectures such as word averaging vastly outperform LSTMs. Our simplest averaging model is even competitive with systems tuned for the particular tasks while also being extremely efficient and easy to use. In order to better understand how these architectures compare, we conduct further experiments on three supervised NLP tasks: sentence similarity, entailment, and sentiment classification. We again find that the word averaging models perform well for sentence similarity and entailment, outperforming LSTMs. However, on sentiment classification, we find that the LSTM performs very strongly-even recording new state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. We then demonstrate how to combine our pretrained sentence embeddings with these supervised tasks, using them both as a prior and as a black box feature extractor. This leads to performance rivaling the state of the art on the SICK similarity and entailment tasks. We release all of our resources to the research community with the hope that they can serve as the new baseline for further work on universal sentence embeddings.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 3, 2016

Classification Benchmarks for Under-resourced Bengali Language based on Multichannel Convolutional-LSTM Network

Exponential growths of social media and micro-blogging sites not only provide platforms for empowering freedom of expressions and individual voices but also enables people to express anti-social behaviour like online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate speech. Numerous works have been proposed to utilize these data for social and anti-social behaviours analysis, document characterization, and sentiment analysis by predicting the contexts mostly for highly resourced languages such as English. However, there are languages that are under-resources, e.g., South Asian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Assamese, Telugu that lack of computational resources for the NLP tasks. In this paper, we provide several classification benchmarks for Bengali, an under-resourced language. We prepared three datasets of expressing hate, commonly used topics, and opinions for hate speech detection, document classification, and sentiment analysis, respectively. We built the largest Bengali word embedding models to date based on 250 million articles, which we call BengFastText. We perform three different experiments, covering document classification, sentiment analysis, and hate speech detection. We incorporate word embeddings into a Multichannel Convolutional-LSTM (MConv-LSTM) network for predicting different types of hate speech, document classification, and sentiment analysis. Experiments demonstrate that BengFastText can capture the semantics of words from respective contexts correctly. Evaluations against several baseline embedding models, e.g., Word2Vec and GloVe yield up to 92.30%, 82.25%, and 90.45% F1-scores in case of document classification, sentiment analysis, and hate speech detection, respectively during 5-fold cross-validation tests.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 11, 2020

Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA): An exploratory task survey

This paper explores the task of identifying the overall sentiment expressed towards volitional entities (persons and organizations) in a document -- what we refer to as Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA). While identifying sentiment conveyed towards an entity is well researched for shorter texts like tweets, we find little to no research on this specific task for longer texts with multiple mentions and opinions towards the same entity. This lack of research would be understandable if ELSA can be derived from existing tasks and models. To assess this, we annotate a set of professional reviews for their overall sentiment towards each volitional entity in the text. We sample from data already annotated for document-level, sentence-level, and target-level sentiment in a multi-domain review corpus, and our results indicate that there is no single proxy task that provides this overall sentiment we seek for the entities at a satisfactory level of performance. We present a suite of experiments aiming to assess the contribution towards ELSA provided by document-, sentence-, and target-level sentiment analysis, and provide a discussion of their shortcomings. We show that sentiment in our dataset is expressed not only with an entity mention as target, but also towards targets with a sentiment-relevant relation to a volitional entity. In our data, these relations extend beyond anaphoric coreference resolution, and our findings call for further research of the topic. Finally, we also present a survey of previous relevant work.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

The ParlaSent multilingual training dataset for sentiment identification in parliamentary proceedings

Sentiments inherently drive politics. How we receive and process information plays an essential role in political decision-making, shaping our judgment with strategic consequences both on the level of legislators and the masses. If sentiment plays such an important role in politics, how can we study and measure it systematically? The paper presents a new dataset of sentiment-annotated sentences, which are used in a series of experiments focused on training a robust sentiment classifier for parliamentary proceedings. The paper also introduces the first domain-specific LLM for political science applications additionally pre-trained on 1.72 billion domain-specific words from proceedings of 27 European parliaments. We present experiments demonstrating how the additional pre-training of LLM on parliamentary data can significantly improve the model downstream performance on the domain-specific tasks, in our case, sentiment detection in parliamentary proceedings. We further show that multilingual models perform very well on unseen languages and that additional data from other languages significantly improves the target parliament's results. The paper makes an important contribution to multiple domains of social sciences and bridges them with computer science and computational linguistics. Lastly, it sets up a more robust approach to sentiment analysis of political texts in general, which allows scholars to study political sentiment from a comparative perspective using standardized tools and techniques.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

RoBERTa-BiLSTM: A Context-Aware Hybrid Model for Sentiment Analysis

Effectively analyzing the comments to uncover latent intentions holds immense value in making strategic decisions across various domains. However, several challenges hinder the process of sentiment analysis including the lexical diversity exhibited in comments, the presence of long dependencies within the text, encountering unknown symbols and words, and dealing with imbalanced datasets. Moreover, existing sentiment analysis tasks mostly leveraged sequential models to encode the long dependent texts and it requires longer execution time as it processes the text sequentially. In contrast, the Transformer requires less execution time due to its parallel processing nature. In this work, we introduce a novel hybrid deep learning model, RoBERTa-BiLSTM, which combines the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks. RoBERTa is utilized to generate meaningful word embedding vectors, while BiLSTM effectively captures the contextual semantics of long-dependent texts. The RoBERTa-BiLSTM hybrid model leverages the strengths of both sequential and Transformer models to enhance performance in sentiment analysis. We conducted experiments using datasets from IMDb, Twitter US Airline, and Sentiment140 to evaluate the proposed model against existing state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the RoBERTa-BiLSTM model surpasses baseline models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa-base, RoBERTa-GRU, and RoBERTa-LSTM), achieving accuracies of 80.74%, 92.36%, and 82.25% on the Twitter US Airline, IMDb, and Sentiment140 datasets, respectively. Additionally, the model achieves F1-scores of 80.73%, 92.35%, and 82.25% on the same datasets, respectively.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1, 2024