Daily Papers

Sentiment is a pervasive feature in natural language text, yet it is an open question how sentiment is represented within Large Language Models (LLMs). In this study, we reveal that across a range of models, sentiment is represented linearly: a single direction in activation space mostly captures the feature across a range of tasks with one extreme for positive and the other for negative. Through causal interventions, we isolate this direction and show it is causally relevant in both toy tasks and real world datasets such as Stanford Sentiment Treebank. Through this case study we model a thorough investigation of what a single direction means on a broad data distribution. We further uncover the mechanisms that involve this direction, highlighting the roles of a small subset of attention heads and neurons. Finally, we discover a phenomenon which we term the summarization motif: sentiment is not solely represented on emotionally charged words, but is additionally summarized at intermediate positions without inherent sentiment, such as punctuation and names. We show that in Stanford Sentiment Treebank zero-shot classification, 76% of above-chance classification accuracy is lost when ablating the sentiment direction, nearly half of which (36%) is due to ablating the summarized sentiment direction exclusively at comma positions.

Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) aims to extract and summarize user opinions from vast opinionated text. Recent studies demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) possess exceptional sentiment understanding capabilities. However, directly deploying LLMs for FSA applications incurs high inference costs. Therefore, this paper investigates the distillation of fine-grained sentiment understanding from LLMs into small language models (SLMs). We prompt LLMs to examine and interpret the sentiments of given reviews and then utilize the generated content to pretrain SLMs. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive FSA benchmark to evaluate both SLMs and LLMs. Extensive experiments on this benchmark reveal that: (1) distillation significantly enhances the performance of SLMs in FSA tasks, achieving a 6.00\% improvement in F_1-score, and the distilled model can outperform Llama-2-7b with only 220M parameters; (2) distillation equips SLMs with excellent zero-shot sentiment classification capabilities, enabling them to match or even exceed their teacher models. These results suggest that distillation from LLMs is a highly promising direction for FSA. We will release our code, data, and pretrained model weights at https://github.com/HITSZ-HLT/FSA-Distillation.

The use of robo-readers to analyze news texts is an emerging technology trend in computational finance. In recent research, a substantial effort has been invested to develop sophisticated financial polarity-lexicons that can be used to investigate how financial sentiments relate to future company performance. However, based on experience from other fields, where sentiment analysis is commonly applied, it is well-known that the overall semantic orientation of a sentence may differ from the prior polarity of individual words. The objective of this article is to investigate how semantic orientations can be better detected in financial and economic news by accommodating the overall phrase-structure information and domain-specific use of language. Our three main contributions are: (1) establishment of a human-annotated finance phrase-bank, which can be used as benchmark for training and evaluating alternative models; (2) presentation of a technique to enhance financial lexicons with attributes that help to identify expected direction of events that affect overall sentiment; (3) development of a linearized phrase-structure model for detecting contextual semantic orientations in financial and economic news texts. The relevance of the newly added lexicon features and the benefit of using the proposed learning-algorithm are demonstrated in a comparative study against previously used general sentiment models as well as the popular word frequency models used in recent financial studies. The proposed framework is parsimonious and avoids the explosion in feature-space caused by the use of conventional n-gram features.

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal task in the domain of natural language processing. It encompasses both text-level sentiment polarity classification and word-level Part of Speech(POS) sentiment polarity determination. Such analysis challenges models to understand text holistically while also extracting nuanced information. With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), new avenues for sentiment analysis have opened. This paper proposes enhancing performance by leveraging the Mutual Reinforcement Effect(MRE) between individual words and the overall text. It delves into how word polarity influences the overarching sentiment of a passage. To support our research, we annotated four novel Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech(SCPOS) datasets, building upon existing sentiment classification datasets. Furthermore, we developed a Universal Sentiment Analysis(USA) model, with a 7-billion parameter size. Experimental results revealed that our model surpassed the performance of gpt-3.5-turbo across all four datasets, underscoring the significance of MRE in sentiment analysis.

Sentiment transfer is one popular example of a text style transfer task, where the goal is to reverse the sentiment polarity of a text. With a sentiment reversal comes also a reversal in meaning. We introduce a different but related task called positive reframing in which we neutralize a negative point of view and generate a more positive perspective for the author without contradicting the original meaning. Our insistence on meaning preservation makes positive reframing a challenging and semantically rich task. To facilitate rapid progress, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, Positive Psychology Frames, with 8,349 sentence pairs and 12,755 structured annotations to explain positive reframing in terms of six theoretically-motivated reframing strategies. Then we evaluate a set of state-of-the-art text style transfer models, and conclude by discussing key challenges and directions for future work.

In this paper, we introduce the task of targeted aspect-based sentiment analysis. The goal is to extract fine-grained information with respect to entities mentioned in user comments. This work extends both aspect-based sentiment analysis that assumes a single entity per document and targeted sentiment analysis that assumes a single sentiment towards a target entity. In particular, we identify the sentiment towards each aspect of one or more entities. As a testbed for this task, we introduce the SentiHood dataset, extracted from a question answering (QA) platform where urban neighbourhoods are discussed by users. In this context units of text often mention several aspects of one or more neighbourhoods. This is the first time that a generic social media platform in this case a QA platform, is used for fine-grained opinion mining. Text coming from QA platforms is far less constrained compared to text from review specific platforms which current datasets are based on. We develop several strong baselines, relying on logistic regression and state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks.

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.

Recent research on explainable recommendation generally frames the task as a standard text generation problem, and evaluates models simply based on the textual similarity between the predicted and ground-truth explanations. However, this approach fails to consider one crucial aspect of the systems: whether their outputs accurately reflect the users' (post-purchase) sentiments, i.e., whether and why they would like and/or dislike the recommended items. To shed light on this issue, we introduce new datasets and evaluation methods that focus on the users' sentiments. Specifically, we construct the datasets by explicitly extracting users' positive and negative opinions from their post-purchase reviews using an LLM, and propose to evaluate systems based on whether the generated explanations 1) align well with the users' sentiments, and 2) accurately identify both positive and negative opinions of users on the target items. We benchmark several recent models on our datasets and demonstrate that achieving strong performance on existing metrics does not ensure that the generated explanations align well with the users' sentiments. Lastly, we find that existing models can provide more sentiment-aware explanations when the users' (predicted) ratings for the target items are directly fed into the models as input. We will release our code and datasets upon acceptance.

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is an important task with obvious application areas in social media, e.g. when indicating hate speech and fake news. In our survey of previous work, we note that there is no large-scale social media data set with sentiment polarity annotations for Finnish. This publications aims to remedy this shortcoming by introducing a 27,000 sentence data set annotated independently with sentiment polarity by three native annotators. We had the same three annotators for the whole data set, which provides a unique opportunity for further studies of annotator behaviour over time. We analyse their inter-annotator agreement and provide two baselines to validate the usefulness of the data set.

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.

Targeted opinion word extraction (TOWE) is a sub-task of aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) which aims to find the opinion words for a given aspect-term in a sentence. Despite their success for TOWE, the current deep learning models fail to exploit the syntactic information of the sentences that have been proved to be useful for TOWE in the prior research. In this work, we propose to incorporate the syntactic structures of the sentences into the deep learning models for TOWE, leveraging the syntax-based opinion possibility scores and the syntactic connections between the words. We also introduce a novel regularization technique to improve the performance of the deep learning models based on the representation distinctions between the words in TOWE. The proposed model is extensively analyzed and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets.

T\"urkiye is located on a fault line; earthquakes often occur on a large and small scale. There is a need for effective solutions for gathering current information during disasters. We can use social media to get insight into public opinion. This insight can be used in public relations and disaster management. In this study, Twitter posts on Izmir Earthquake that took place on October 2020 are analyzed. We question if this analysis can be used to make social inferences on time. Data mining and natural language processing (NLP) methods are used for this analysis. NLP is used for sentiment analysis and topic modelling. The latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm is used for topic modelling. We used the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model working with Transformers architecture for sentiment analysis. It is shown that the users shared their goodwill wishes and aimed to contribute to the initiated aid activities after the earthquake. The users desired to make their voices heard by competent institutions and organizations. The proposed methods work effectively. Future studies are also discussed.

Artificial writing is permeating our lives due to recent advances in large-scale, transformer-based language models (LMs) such as BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others. Using them as pre-trained models and fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended state of the art for many NLP tasks and shown that they capture not only linguistic knowledge but also retain general knowledge implicitly present in the data. Unfortunately, LMs trained on unfiltered text corpora suffer from degenerated and biased behaviour. While this is well established, we show that recent LMs also contain human-like biases of what is right and wrong to do, some form of ethical and moral norms of the society -- they bring a "moral direction" to surface. That is, we show that these norms can be captured geometrically by a direction, which can be computed, e.g., by a PCA, in the embedding space, reflecting well the agreement of phrases to social norms implicitly expressed in the training texts and providing a path for attenuating or even preventing toxic degeneration in LMs. Being able to rate the (non-)normativity of arbitrary phrases without explicitly training the LM for this task, we demonstrate the capabilities of the "moral direction" for guiding (even other) LMs towards producing normative text and showcase it on RealToxicityPrompts testbed, preventing the neural toxic degeneration in GPT-2.

The Philippines is a common ground to natural calamities like typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. With Twitter as one of the most used social media platform in the Philippines, a total of 39,867 preprocessed tweets were obtained given a time frame starting from November 1, 2013 to January 31, 2014. Sentiment analysis determines the underlying emotion given a series of words. The main purpose of this study is to identify the sentiments expressed in the tweets sent by the Filipino people before, during, and after Typhoon Yolanda using two variations of Recurrent Neural Networks; standard and bidirectional. The best generated models after training with various hyperparameters achieved a high accuracy of 81.79% for fine-grained classification using standard RNN and 87.69% for binary classification using bidirectional RNN. Findings revealed that 51.1% of the tweets sent were positive expressing support, love, and words of courage to the victims; 19.8% were negative stating sadness and despair for the loss of lives and hate for corrupt officials; while the other 29% were neutral tweets from local news stations, announcements of relief operations, donation drives, and observations by citizens.

Opinion mining, also known as sentiment analysis, is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on identifying and extracting subjective information in textual material. This can include determining the overall sentiment of a piece of text (e.g., positive or negative), as well as identifying specific emotions or opinions expressed in the text, that involves the use of advanced machine and deep learning techniques. Recently, transformer-based language models make this task of human emotion analysis intuitive, thanks to the attention mechanism and parallel computation. These advantages make such models very powerful on linguistic tasks, unlike recurrent neural networks that spend a lot of time on sequential processing, making them prone to fail when it comes to processing long text. The scope of our paper aims to study the behaviour of the cutting-edge Transformer-based language models on opinion mining and provide a high-level comparison between them to highlight their key particularities. Additionally, our comparative study shows leads and paves the way for production engineers regarding the approach to focus on and is useful for researchers as it provides guidelines for future research subjects.

Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many GLUE tasks, remain constant after input words are randomly shuffled. Despite BERT embeddings are famously contextual, the contribution of each individual word to downstream tasks is almost unchanged even after the word's context is shuffled. BERT-based models are able to exploit superficial cues (e.g. the sentiment of keywords in sentiment analysis; or the word-wise similarity between sequence-pair inputs in natural language inference) to make correct decisions when tokens are arranged in random orders. Encouraging classifiers to capture word order information improves the performance on most GLUE tasks, SQuAD 2.0 and out-of-samples. Our work suggests that many GLUE tasks are not challenging machines to understand the meaning of a sentence.

Text sentiment transfer aims to flip the sentiment polarity of a sentence (positive to negative or vice versa) while preserving its sentiment-independent content. Although current models show good results at changing the sentiment, content preservation in transferred sentences is insufficient. In this paper, we present a sentiment transfer model based on polarity-aware denoising, which accurately controls the sentiment attributes in generated text, preserving the content to a great extent and helping to balance the style-content trade-off. Our proposed model is structured around two key stages in the sentiment transfer process: better representation learning using a shared encoder and sentiment-controlled generation using separate sentiment-specific decoders. Empirical results show that our methods outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of content preservation while staying competitive in terms of style transfer accuracy and fluency.

We used a dataset of daily Bloomberg Financial Market Summaries from 2010 to 2023, reposted on large financial media, to determine how global news headlines may affect stock market movements using ChatGPT and a two-stage prompt approach. We document a statistically significant positive correlation between the sentiment score and future equity market returns over short to medium term, which reverts to a negative correlation over longer horizons. Validation of this correlation pattern across multiple equity markets indicates its robustness across equity regions and resilience to non-linearity, evidenced by comparison of Pearson and Spearman correlations. Finally, we provide an estimate of the optimal horizon that strikes a balance between reactivity to new information and correlation.

Recent advancements in Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive success in generating high-quality images with zero-shot generalization capabilities. Yet, current models struggle to closely adhere to prompt semantics, often misrepresenting or overlooking specific attributes. To address this, we propose a simple, training-free approach that modulates the guidance direction of diffusion models during inference. We first decompose the prompt semantics into a set of concepts, and monitor the guidance trajectory in relation to each concept. Our key observation is that deviations in model's adherence to prompt semantics are highly correlated with divergence of the guidance from one or more of these concepts. Based on this observation, we devise a technique to steer the guidance direction towards any concept from which the model diverges. Extensive experimentation validates that our method improves the semantic alignment of images generated by diffusion models in response to prompts. Project page is available at: https://korguy.github.io/

Aspect-based sentiment Analysis (ABSA) delves into understanding sentiments specific to distinct elements within textual content. It aims to analyze user-generated reviews to determine a) the target entity being reviewed, b) the high-level aspect to which it belongs, c) the sentiment words used to express the opinion, and d) the sentiment expressed toward the targets and the aspects. While various benchmark datasets have fostered advancements in ABSA, they often come with domain limitations and data granularity challenges. Addressing these, we introduce the OATS dataset, which encompasses three fresh domains and consists of 20,000 sentence-level quadruples and 13,000 review-level tuples. Our initiative seeks to bridge specific observed gaps: the recurrent focus on familiar domains like restaurants and laptops, limited data for intricate quadruple extraction tasks, and an occasional oversight of the synergy between sentence and review-level sentiments. Moreover, to elucidate OATS's potential and shed light on various ABSA subtasks that OATS can solve, we conducted in-domain and cross-domain experiments, establishing initial baselines. We hope the OATS dataset augments current resources, paving the way for an encompassing exploration of ABSA.

Recent well-known works demonstrate encouraging progress in aspect-based sentiment classification (ABSC), while implicit aspect sentiment modeling is still a problem that has to be solved. Our preliminary study shows that implicit aspect sentiments usually depend on adjacent aspects' sentiments, which indicates we can extract implicit sentiment via local sentiment dependency modeling. We formulate a local sentiment aggregation paradigm (LSA) based on empirical sentiment patterns (SP) to address sentiment dependency modeling. Compared to existing methods, LSA is an efficient approach that learns the implicit sentiments in a local sentiment aggregation window, which tackles the efficiency problem and avoids the token-node alignment problem of syntax-based methods. Furthermore, we refine a differential weighting method based on gradient descent that guides the construction of the sentiment aggregation window. According to experimental results, LSA is effective for all objective ABSC models, attaining state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets. LSA is an adaptive paradigm and is ready to be adapted to existing models, and we release the code to offer insight to improve existing ABSC models.

Aspect based sentiment analysis aims to identify the sentimental tendency towards a given aspect in text. Fine-tuning of pretrained BERT performs excellent on this task and achieves state-of-the-art performances. Existing BERT-based works only utilize the last output layer of BERT and ignore the semantic knowledge in the intermediate layers. This paper explores the potential of utilizing BERT intermediate layers to enhance the performance of fine-tuning of BERT. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work has been done on this research. To show the generality, we also apply this approach to a natural language inference task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach.

Differing from sentiment transfer, positive reframing seeks to substitute negative perspectives with positive expressions while preserving the original meaning. With the emergence of pre-trained language models (PLMs), it is possible to achieve acceptable results by fine-tuning PLMs. Nevertheless, generating fluent, diverse and task-constrained reframing text remains a significant challenge. To tackle this issue, a multi-strategy optimization framework (MSOF) is proposed in this paper. Starting from the objective of positive reframing, we first design positive sentiment reward and content preservation reward to encourage the model to transform the negative expressions of the original text while ensuring the integrity and consistency of the semantics. Then, different decoding optimization approaches are introduced to improve the quality of text generation. Finally, based on the modeling formula of positive reframing, we propose a multi-dimensional re-ranking method that further selects candidate sentences from three dimensions: strategy consistency, text similarity and fluency. Extensive experiments on two Seq2Seq PLMs, BART and T5, demonstrate our framework achieves significant improvements on unconstrained and controlled positive reframing tasks.

Language models (LMs) are increasingly being used in open-ended contexts, where the opinions reflected by LMs in response to subjective queries can have a profound impact, both on user satisfaction, as well as shaping the views of society at large. In this work, we put forth a quantitative framework to investigate the opinions reflected by LMs -- by leveraging high-quality public opinion polls and their associated human responses. Using this framework, we create OpinionsQA, a new dataset for evaluating the alignment of LM opinions with those of 60 US demographic groups over topics ranging from abortion to automation. Across topics, we find substantial misalignment between the views reflected by current LMs and those of US demographic groups: on par with the Democrat-Republican divide on climate change. Notably, this misalignment persists even after explicitly steering the LMs towards particular demographic groups. Our analysis not only confirms prior observations about the left-leaning tendencies of some human feedback-tuned LMs, but also surfaces groups whose opinions are poorly reflected by current LMs (e.g., 65+ and widowed individuals). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tatsu-lab/opinions_qa.

We explore the properties of byte-level recurrent language models. When given sufficient amounts of capacity, training data, and compute time, the representations learned by these models include disentangled features corresponding to high-level concepts. Specifically, we find a single unit which performs sentiment analysis. These representations, learned in an unsupervised manner, achieve state of the art on the binary subset of the Stanford Sentiment Treebank. They are also very data efficient. When using only a handful of labeled examples, our approach matches the performance of strong baselines trained on full datasets. We also demonstrate the sentiment unit has a direct influence on the generative process of the model. Simply fixing its value to be positive or negative generates samples with the corresponding positive or negative sentiment.

Sentiment Analysis is one of the most classical and primarily studied natural language processing tasks. This problem had a notable advance with the proposition of more complex and scalable machine learning models. Despite this progress, the Brazilian Portuguese language still disposes only of limited linguistic resources, such as datasets dedicated to sentiment classification, especially when considering the existence of predefined partitions in training, testing, and validation sets that would allow a more fair comparison of different algorithm alternatives. Motivated by these issues, this work analyzes the predictive performance of a range of document embedding strategies, assuming the polarity as the system outcome. This analysis includes five sentiment analysis datasets in Brazilian Portuguese, unified in a single dataset, and a reference partitioning in training, testing, and validation sets, both made publicly available through a digital repository. A cross-evaluation of dataset-specific models over different contexts is conducted to evaluate their generalization capabilities and the feasibility of adopting a unique model for addressing all scenarios.

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/

Current language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in text generation. However, for many applications it is desirable to control attributes, such as sentiment, or toxicity, of the generated language -- ideally tailored towards each specific use case and target audience. For auto-regressive language models, existing guidance methods are prone to decoding errors that cascade during generation and degrade performance. In contrast, text diffusion models can easily be guided with, for example, a simple linear sentiment classifier -- however they do suffer from significantly higher perplexity than auto-regressive alternatives. In this paper we use a guided diffusion model to produce a latent proposal that steers an auto-regressive language model to generate text with desired properties. Our model inherits the unmatched fluency of the auto-regressive approach and the plug-and-play flexibility of diffusion. We show that it outperforms previous plug-and-play guidance methods across a wide range of benchmark data sets. Further, controlling a new attribute in our framework is reduced to training a single logistic regression classifier.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) seeks to predict the sentiment polarity of a sentence toward a specific aspect. Recently, it has been shown that dependency trees can be integrated into deep learning models to produce the state-of-the-art performance for ABSA. However, these models tend to compute the hidden/representation vectors without considering the aspect terms and fail to benefit from the overall contextual importance scores of the words that can be obtained from the dependency tree for ABSA. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based deep learning model to overcome these two issues of the prior work on ABSA. In our model, gate vectors are generated from the representation vectors of the aspect terms to customize the hidden vectors of the graph-based models toward the aspect terms. In addition, we propose a mechanism to obtain the importance scores for each word in the sentences based on the dependency trees that are then injected into the model to improve the representation vectors for ABSA. The proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.

There is a growing collection of work analyzing and mitigating societal biases in language understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks, though examining biases in creative tasks remains underexplored. Creative language applications are meant for direct interaction with users, so it is important to quantify and mitigate societal biases in these applications. We introduce a novel study on a pipeline to mitigate societal biases when retrieving next verse suggestions in a poetry composition system. Our results suggest that data augmentation through sentiment style transfer has potential for mitigating societal biases.

Transformer language models (LMs) have been shown to represent concepts as directions in the latent space of hidden activations. However, for any given human-interpretable concept, how can we find its direction in the latent space? We present a technique called linear relational concepts (LRC) for finding concept directions corresponding to human-interpretable concepts at a given hidden layer in a transformer LM by first modeling the relation between subject and object as a linear relational embedding (LRE). While the LRE work was mainly presented as an exercise in understanding model representations, we find that inverting the LRE while using earlier object layers results in a powerful technique to find concept directions that both work well as a classifier and causally influence model outputs.

With the development of the Internet, social media has become an important channel for posting disaster-related information. Analyzing attitudes hidden in these texts, known as sentiment analysis, is crucial for the government or relief agencies to improve disaster response efficiency, but it has not received sufficient attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by focusing on investigating attitudes towards disaster response and analyzing targeted relief supplies during disaster response. The contributions of this paper are fourfold. First, we propose several machine learning models for classifying public sentiment concerning disaster-related social media data. Second, we create a natural disaster dataset with sentiment labels, which contains nearly 50,00 Twitter data about different natural disasters in the United States (e.g., a tornado in 2011, a hurricane named Sandy in 2012, a series of floods in 2013, a hurricane named Matthew in 2016, a blizzard in 2016, a hurricane named Harvey in 2017, a hurricane named Michael in 2018, a series of wildfires in 2018, and a hurricane named Dorian in 2019). We are making our dataset available to the research community: https://github.com/Dong-UTIL/Natural-Hazards-Twitter-Dataset. It is our hope that our contribution will enable the study of sentiment analysis in disaster response. Third, we focus on extracting public attitudes and analyzing the essential needs (e.g., food, housing, transportation, and medical supplies) for the public during disaster response, instead of merely targeting on studying positive or negative attitudes of the public to natural disasters. Fourth, we conduct this research from two different dimensions for a comprehensive understanding of public opinion on disaster response, since disparate hazards caused by different types of natural disasters.

We explore unconstrained natural language feedback as a learning signal for artificial agents. Humans use rich and varied language to teach, yet most prior work on interactive learning from language assumes a particular form of input (e.g., commands). We propose a general framework which does not make this assumption, using aspect-based sentiment analysis to decompose feedback into sentiment about the features of a Markov decision process. We then perform an analogue of inverse reinforcement learning, regressing the sentiment on the features to infer the teacher's latent reward function. To evaluate our approach, we first collect a corpus of teaching behavior in a cooperative task where both teacher and learner are human. We implement three artificial learners: sentiment-based "literal" and "pragmatic" models, and an inference network trained end-to-end to predict latent rewards. We then repeat our initial experiment and pair them with human teachers. All three successfully learn from interactive human feedback. The sentiment models outperform the inference network, with the "pragmatic" model approaching human performance. Our work thus provides insight into the information structure of naturalistic linguistic feedback as well as methods to leverage it for reinforcement learning.

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be distributionally aligned remains uncertain. This notion of distributional alignment is complex, as there is significant variation in the types of attributes that are simulated. Prior works have underexplored the role of three critical variables -- the question domain, steering method, and distribution expression method -- which motivates our contribution of a benchmark explicitly addressing these dimensions. We construct a dataset expanding beyond political values, create human baselines for this task, and evaluate the extent to which an LM can align with a particular group's opinion distribution to inform design choices of such simulation systems. Our analysis reveals open problems regarding if, and how, LMs can be used to simulate humans, and that LLMs can more accurately describe the opinion distribution than simulate such distributions.

Language models often exhibit undesirable behavior, e.g., generating toxic or gender-biased text. In the case of neural language models, an encoding of the undesirable behavior is often present in the model's representations. Thus, one natural (and common) approach to prevent the model from exhibiting undesirable behavior is to steer the model's representations in a manner that reduces the probability of it generating undesirable text. This paper investigates the formal and empirical properties of steering functions, i.e., transformation of the neural language model's representations that alter its behavior. First, we derive two optimal, in the least-squares sense, affine steering functions under different constraints. Our theory provides justification for existing approaches and offers a novel, improved steering approach. Second, we offer a series of experiments that demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of the methods in mitigating bias and reducing toxic generation.

Recently, sentiment analysis has seen remarkable advance with the help of pre-training approaches. However, sentiment knowledge, such as sentiment words and aspect-sentiment pairs, is ignored in the process of pre-training, despite the fact that they are widely used in traditional sentiment analysis approaches. In this paper, we introduce Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training (SKEP) in order to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. With the help of automatically-mined knowledge, SKEP conducts sentiment masking and constructs three sentiment knowledge prediction objectives, so as to embed sentiment information at the word, polarity and aspect level into pre-trained sentiment representation. In particular, the prediction of aspect-sentiment pairs is converted into multi-label classification, aiming to capture the dependency between words in a pair. Experiments on three kinds of sentiment tasks show that SKEP significantly outperforms strong pre-training baseline, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on most of the test datasets. We release our code at https://github.com/baidu/Senta.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at predicting sentiment polarity (SC) or extracting opinion span (OE) expressed towards a given aspect. Previous work in ABSA mostly relies on rather complicated aspect-specific feature induction. Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs), e.g., BERT, have been used as context modeling layers to simplify the feature induction structures and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, such PLM-based context modeling can be not that aspect-specific. Therefore, a key question is left under-explored: how the aspect-specific context can be better modeled through PLMs? To answer the question, we attempt to enhance aspect-specific context modeling with PLM in a non-intrusive manner. We propose three aspect-specific input transformations, namely aspect companion, aspect prompt, and aspect marker. Informed by these transformations, non-intrusive aspect-specific PLMs can be achieved to promote the PLM to pay more attention to the aspect-specific context in a sentence. Additionally, we craft an adversarial benchmark for ABSA (advABSA) to see how aspect-specific modeling can impact model robustness. Extensive experimental results on standard and adversarial benchmarks for SC and OE demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, yielding new state-of-the-art performance on OE and competitive performance on SC.

LLMs are increasingly powerful and widely used to assist users in a variety of tasks. This use risks the introduction of LLM biases to consequential decisions such as job hiring, human performance evaluation, and criminal sentencing. Bias in NLP systems along the lines of gender and ethnicity has been widely studied, especially for specific stereotypes (e.g., Asians are good at math). In this paper, we investigate bias along less-studied but still consequential, dimensions, such as age and beauty, measuring subtler correlated decisions that LLMs make between social groups and unrelated positive and negative attributes. We ask whether LLMs hold wide-reaching biases of positive or negative sentiment for specific social groups similar to the ``what is beautiful is good'' bias found in people in experimental psychology. We introduce a template-generated dataset of sentence completion tasks that asks the model to select the most appropriate attribute to complete an evaluative statement about a person described as a member of a specific social group. We also reverse the completion task to select the social group based on an attribute. We report the correlations that we find for 4 cutting-edge LLMs. This dataset can be used as a benchmark to evaluate progress in more generalized biases and the templating technique can be used to expand the benchmark with minimal additional human annotation.

Markets and policymakers around the world hang on the consequential monetary policy decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Publicly available textual documentation of their meetings provides insight into members' attitudes about the economy. We use GPT-4 to quantify dissent among members on the topic of inflation. We find that transcripts and minutes reflect the diversity of member views about the macroeconomic outlook in a way that is lost or omitted from the public statements. In fact, diverging opinions that shed light upon the committee's "true" attitudes are almost entirely omitted from the final statements. Hence, we argue that forecasting FOMC sentiment based solely on statements will not sufficiently reflect dissent among the hawks and doves.

Sentiment analysis is a widely researched area within Natural Language Processing (NLP), attracting significant interest due to the advent of automated solutions. Despite this, the task remains challenging because of the inherent complexity of languages and the subjective nature of sentiments. It is even more challenging for less-studied and less-resourced languages such as Lithuanian. Our review of existing Lithuanian NLP research reveals that traditional machine learning methods and classification algorithms have limited effectiveness for the task. In this work, we address sentiment analysis of Lithuanian five-star-based online reviews from multiple domains that we collect and clean. We apply transformer models to this task for the first time, exploring the capabilities of pre-trained multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically focusing on fine-tuning BERT and T5 models. Given the inherent difficulty of the task, the fine-tuned models perform quite well, especially when the sentiments themselves are less ambiguous: 80.74% and 89.61% testing recognition accuracy of the most popular one- and five-star reviews respectively. They significantly outperform current commercial state-of-the-art general-purpose LLM GPT-4. We openly share our fine-tuned LLMs online.

In this work, we address the problem of directing the text generations of a LLM towards a desired behavior, aligning the generated text with the preferences of the human operator. We propose using another language model as a critic, reward model in a zero-shot way thanks to the prompt of a Yes-No question that represents the user preferences, without requiring further labeled data. This zero-shot reward model provides the learning signal to further fine-tune the base LLM using reinforcement learning, as in RLAIF; yet our approach is also compatible in other contexts such as quality-diversity search. Extensive evidence of the capabilities of the proposed ZYN framework is provided through experiments in different domains related to text generation, including detoxification; optimizing sentiment of movie reviews, or any other attribute; steering the opinion about a particular topic the model may have; and personalizing prompt generators for text-to-image tasks. Code to be released at https://github.com/vicgalle/zero-shot-reward-models/.

The large amount of data available in social media, forums and websites motivates researches in several areas of Natural Language Processing, such as sentiment analysis. The popularity of the area due to its subjective and semantic characteristics motivates research on novel methods and approaches for classification. Hence, there is a high demand for datasets on different domains and different languages. This paper introduces TweetSentBR, a sentiment corpora for Brazilian Portuguese manually annotated with 15.000 sentences on TV show domain. The sentences were labeled in three classes (positive, neutral and negative) by seven annotators, following literature guidelines for ensuring reliability on the annotation. We also ran baseline experiments on polarity classification using three machine learning methods, reaching 80.99% on F-Measure and 82.06% on accuracy in binary classification, and 59.85% F-Measure and 64.62% on accuracy on three point classification.

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.

We present a systematic study of biases in natural language generation (NLG) by analyzing text generated from prompts that contain mentions of different demographic groups. In this work, we introduce the notion of the regard towards a demographic, use the varying levels of regard towards different demographics as a defining metric for bias in NLG, and analyze the extent to which sentiment scores are a relevant proxy metric for regard. To this end, we collect strategically-generated text from language models and manually annotate the text with both sentiment and regard scores. Additionally, we build an automatic regard classifier through transfer learning, so that we can analyze biases in unseen text. Together, these methods reveal the extent of the biased nature of language model generations. Our analysis provides a study of biases in NLG, bias metrics and correlated human judgments, and empirical evidence on the usefulness of our annotated dataset.

Polarization is defined as divisive opinions held by two or more groups on substantive issues. As the world's third-largest democracy, Indonesia faces growing concerns about the interplay between political polarization and online toxicity, which is often directed at vulnerable minority groups. Despite the importance of this issue, previous NLP research has not fully explored the relationship between toxicity and polarization. To bridge this gap, we present a novel multi-label Indonesian dataset that incorporates toxicity, polarization, and annotator demographic information. Benchmarking this dataset using BERT-base models and large language models (LLMs) shows that polarization information enhances toxicity classification, and vice versa. Furthermore, providing demographic information significantly improves the performance of polarization classification.

Sentiment analysis and emotion detection are important research topics in natural language processing (NLP) and benefit many downstream tasks. With the widespread application of LLMs, researchers have started exploring the application of LLMs based on instruction-tuning in the field of sentiment analysis. However, these models only focus on single aspects of affective classification tasks (e.g. sentimental polarity or categorical emotions), and overlook the regression tasks (e.g. sentiment strength or emotion intensity), which leads to poor performance in downstream tasks. The main reason is the lack of comprehensive affective instruction tuning datasets and evaluation benchmarks, which cover various affective classification and regression tasks. Moreover, although emotional information is useful for downstream tasks, existing downstream datasets lack high-quality and comprehensive affective annotations. In this paper, we propose EmoLLMs, the first series of open-sourced instruction-following LLMs for comprehensive affective analysis based on fine-tuning various LLMs with instruction data, the first multi-task affective analysis instruction dataset (AAID) with 234K data samples based on various classification and regression tasks to support LLM instruction tuning, and a comprehensive affective evaluation benchmark (AEB) with 14 tasks from various sources and domains to test the generalization ability of LLMs. We propose a series of EmoLLMs by fine-tuning LLMs with AAID to solve various affective instruction tasks. We compare our model with a variety of LLMs on AEB, where our models outperform all other open-sourced LLMs, and surpass ChatGPT and GPT-4 in most tasks, which shows that the series of EmoLLMs achieve the ChatGPT-level and GPT-4-level generalization capabilities on affective analysis tasks, and demonstrates our models can be used as affective annotation tools.

Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies especially in the western world (e.g., 48% of Europeans use social media every day or almost every day). Platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in political discussion. In the same vein, politicians use Twitter to express their opinions, debate among others on current topics and promote their political agenda aiming to influence voter behaviour. Previous studies have shown that tweets conveying negative sentiment are likely to be retweeted more frequently. In this paper, we attempt to analyse tweets of politicians from different countries and explore whether their tweets follow the same trend. Utilising state-of-the-art pre-trained language models we performed sentiment analysis on hundreds of thousands of tweets collected from members of parliament of Greece, Spain and United Kingdom, including devolved administrations. We achieved this by systematically exploring and analysing the differences between influential and less popular tweets. Our analysis indicates that politicians' negatively charged tweets spread more widely, especially in more recent times, and highlights interesting trends in the intersection of sentiment and popularity.

In the past few years, the growth of e-commerce and digital marketing in Vietnam has generated a huge volume of opinionated data. Analyzing those data would provide enterprises with insight for better business decisions. In this work, as part of the Advosights project, we study sentiment analysis of product reviews in Vietnamese. The final solution is based on Self-attention neural networks, a flexible architecture for text classification task with about 90.16% of accuracy in 0.0124 second, a very fast inference time.

Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased LLMs may subtly influence society when they are used by millions of people. Such real-world concerns, however, stand in stark contrast to the artificiality of current evaluations: real users do not typically ask LLMs survey questions. Motivated by this discrepancy, we challenge the prevailing constrained evaluation paradigm for values and opinions in LLMs and explore more realistic unconstrained evaluations. As a case study, we focus on the popular Political Compass Test (PCT). In a systematic review, we find that most prior work using the PCT forces models to comply with the PCT's multiple-choice format. We show that models give substantively different answers when not forced; that answers change depending on how models are forced; and that answers lack paraphrase robustness. Then, we demonstrate that models give different answers yet again in a more realistic open-ended answer setting. We distill these findings into recommendations and open challenges in evaluating values and opinions in LLMs.

In this paper, we propose document-level end-to-end sentiment analysis to efficiently understand aspect and review sentiment expressed in online reviews in a unified manner. In particular, we assume that star rating labels are a "coarse-grained synthesis" of aspect ratings across in the review. We propose a Distantly Supervised Pyramid Network (DSPN) to efficiently perform Aspect-Category Detection, Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis, and Rating Prediction using only document star rating labels for training. By performing these three related sentiment subtasks in an end-to-end manner, DSPN can extract aspects mentioned in the review, identify the corresponding sentiments, and predict the star rating labels. We evaluate DSPN on multi-aspect review datasets in English and Chinese and find that with only star rating labels for supervision, DSPN can perform comparably well to a variety of benchmark models. We also demonstrate the interpretability of DSPN's outputs on reviews to show the pyramid structure inherent in document level end-to-end sentiment analysis.

We study the probabilistic modeling performed by Autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) through the angle of time directionality, addressing a question first raised in (Shannon, 1951). For large enough models, we empirically find a time asymmetry in their ability to learn natural language: a difference in the average log-perplexity when trying to predict the next token versus when trying to predict the previous one. This difference is at the same time subtle and very consistent across various modalities (language, model size, training time, ...). Theoretically, this is surprising: from an information-theoretic point of view, there should be no such difference. We provide a theoretical framework to explain how such an asymmetry can appear from sparsity and computational complexity considerations, and outline a number of perspectives opened by our results.

This paper presents the TartuNLP team submission to EvaLatin 2024 shared task of the emotion polarity detection for historical Latin texts. Our system relies on two distinct approaches to annotating training data for supervised learning: 1) creating heuristics-based labels by adopting the polarity lexicon provided by the organizers and 2) generating labels with GPT4. We employed parameter efficient fine-tuning using the adapters framework and experimented with both monolingual and cross-lingual knowledge transfer for training language and task adapters. Our submission with the LLM-generated labels achieved the overall first place in the emotion polarity detection task. Our results show that LLM-based annotations show promising results on texts in Latin.

Sentiment analysis is a vital tool for uncovering insights from financial articles, news, and social media, shaping our understanding of market movements. Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in financial natural language processing (NLP), they still struggle with accurately interpreting numerical values and grasping financial context, limiting their effectiveness in predicting financial sentiment. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective instruction tuning approach to address these issues. By transforming a small portion of supervised financial sentiment analysis data into instruction data and fine-tuning a general-purpose LLM with this method, we achieve remarkable advancements in financial sentiment analysis. In the experiment, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art supervised sentiment analysis models, as well as widely used LLMs like ChatGPT and LLaMAs, particularly in scenarios where numerical understanding and contextual comprehension are vital.

The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.

Over the last few years, machine learning based methods have been applied to extract information from news flow in the financial domain. However, this information has mostly been in the form of the financial sentiments contained in the news headlines, primarily for the stock prices. In our current work, we propose that various other dimensions of information can be extracted from news headlines, which will be of interest to investors, policy-makers and other practitioners. We propose a framework that extracts information such as past movements and expected directionality in prices, asset comparison and other general information that the news is referring to. We apply this framework to the commodity "Gold" and train the machine learning models using a dataset of 11,412 human-annotated news headlines (released with this study), collected from the period 2000-2019. We experiment to validate the causal effect of news flow on gold prices and observe that the information produced from our framework significantly impacts the future gold price.

Target-based sentiment analysis or aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) refers to addressing various sentiment analysis tasks at a fine-grained level, which includes but is not limited to aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and opinion extraction. There exist many solvers of the above individual subtasks or a combination of two subtasks, and they can work together to tell a complete story, i.e. the discussed aspect, the sentiment on it, and the cause of the sentiment. However, no previous ABSA research tried to provide a complete solution in one shot. In this paper, we introduce a new subtask under ABSA, named aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE). Particularly, a solver of this task needs to extract triplets (What, How, Why) from the inputs, which show WHAT the targeted aspects are, HOW their sentiment polarities are and WHY they have such polarities (i.e. opinion reasons). For instance, one triplet from "Waiters are very friendly and the pasta is simply average" could be ('Waiters', positive, 'friendly'). We propose a two-stage framework to address this task. The first stage predicts what, how and why in a unified model, and then the second stage pairs up the predicted what (how) and why from the first stage to output triplets. In the experiments, our framework has set a benchmark performance in this novel triplet extraction task. Meanwhile, it outperforms a few strong baselines adapted from state-of-the-art related methods.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is an NLP task that entails processing user-generated reviews to determine (i) the target being evaluated, (ii) the aspect category to which it belongs, and (iii) the sentiment expressed towards the target and aspect pair. In this article, we propose transforming ABSA into an abstract summary-like conditional text generation task that uses targets, aspects, and polarities to generate auxiliary statements. To demonstrate the efficacy of our task formulation and a proposed system, we fine-tune a pre-trained model for conditional text generation tasks to get new state-of-the-art results on a few restaurant domains and urban neighborhoods domain benchmark datasets.

We survey 146 papers analyzing "bias" in NLP systems, finding that their motivations are often vague, inconsistent, and lacking in normative reasoning, despite the fact that analyzing "bias" is an inherently normative process. We further find that these papers' proposed quantitative techniques for measuring or mitigating "bias" are poorly matched to their motivations and do not engage with the relevant literature outside of NLP. Based on these findings, we describe the beginnings of a path forward by proposing three recommendations that should guide work analyzing "bias" in NLP systems. These recommendations rest on a greater recognition of the relationships between language and social hierarchies, encouraging researchers and practitioners to articulate their conceptualizations of "bias"---i.e., what kinds of system behaviors are harmful, in what ways, to whom, and why, as well as the normative reasoning underlying these statements---and to center work around the lived experiences of members of communities affected by NLP systems, while interrogating and reimagining the power relations between technologists and such communities.

Sentiment analysis is one of the most fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing. Popular languages like English, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and also Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil have seen a significant amount of work in this area. However, the Marathi language which is the third most popular language in India still lags behind due to the absence of proper datasets. In this paper, we present the first major publicly available Marathi Sentiment Analysis Dataset - L3CubeMahaSent. It is curated using tweets extracted from various Maharashtrian personalities' Twitter accounts. Our dataset consists of ~16,000 distinct tweets classified in three broad classes viz. positive, negative, and neutral. We also present the guidelines using which we annotated the tweets. Finally, we present the statistics of our dataset and baseline classification results using CNN, LSTM, ULMFiT, and BERT-based deep learning models.

Modeling users' dynamic and evolving preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks (e.g., Recurrent Neural Network) to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Although these methods achieve satisfactory results, they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. We argue that such left-to-right unidirectional architectures restrict the power of the historical sequence representations. For this purpose, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for sequential Recommendation (BERT4Rec). However, jointly conditioning on both left and right context in deep bidirectional model would make the training become trivial since each item can indirectly "see the target item". To address this problem, we train the bidirectional model using the Cloze task, predicting the masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. Comparing with predicting the next item at each position in a sequence, the Cloze task can produce more samples to train a more powerful bidirectional model. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

A movie that is thoroughly enjoyed and recommended by an individual might be hated by another. One characteristic of humans is the ability to have feelings which could be positive or negative. To automatically classify and study human feelings, an aspect of natural language processing, sentiment analysis and opinion mining were designed to understand human feelings regarding several issues which could affect a product, a social media platforms, government, or societal discussions or even movies. Several works on sentiment analysis have been done on high resource languages while low resources languages like Yoruba have been sidelined. Due to the scarcity of datasets and linguistic architectures that will suit low resource languages, African languages "low resource languages" have been ignored and not fully explored. For this reason, our attention is placed on Yoruba to explore sentiment analysis on reviews of Nigerian movies. The data comprised 1500 movie reviews that were sourced from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Cinemapointer and Nollyrated. We develop sentiment classification models using the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models like mBERT and AfriBERTa to classify the movie reviews.

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.

Hope Speech Detection, a task of recognizing positive expressions, has made significant strides recently. However, much of the current works focus on model development without considering the issue of inherent imbalance in the data. Our work revisits this issue in hope-speech detection by introducing focal loss, data augmentation, and pre-processing strategies. Accordingly, we find that introducing focal loss as part of Multilingual-BERT's (M-BERT) training process mitigates the effect of class imbalance and improves overall F1-Macro by 0.11. At the same time, contextual and back-translation-based word augmentation with M-BERT improves results by 0.10 over baseline despite imbalance. Finally, we show that overlapping word removal based on pre-processing, though simple, improves F1-Macro by 0.28. In due process, we present detailed studies depicting various behaviors of each of these strategies and summarize key findings from our empirical results for those interested in getting the most out of M-BERT for hope speech detection under real-world conditions of data imbalance.

Expression of sentiment in parliamentary debates is deemed to be significantly different from that on social media or in product reviews. This paper adds to an emerging body of research on parliamentary debates with a dataset of sentences annotated for detection sentiment polarity in political discourse. We sample the sentences for annotation from the proceedings of three Southeast European parliaments: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. A six-level schema is applied to the data with the aim of training a classification model for the detection of sentiment in parliamentary proceedings. Krippendorff's alpha measuring the inter-annotator agreement ranges from 0.6 for the six-level annotation schema to 0.75 for the three-level schema and 0.83 for the two-level schema. Our initial experiments on the dataset show that transformer models perform significantly better than those using a simpler architecture. Furthermore, regardless of the similarity of the three languages, we observe differences in performance across different languages. Performing parliament-specific training and evaluation shows that the main reason for the differing performance between parliaments seems to be the different complexity of the automatic classification task, which is not observable in annotator performance. Language distance does not seem to play any role neither in annotator nor in automatic classification performance. We release the dataset and the best-performing model under permissive licences.

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on learning how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to steer the model to generate a target sentence is already encoded within the model. Accordingly, we explore a different approach altogether: extracting latent vectors directly from pretrained language model decoders without fine-tuning. Experiments show that there exist steering vectors, which, when added to the hidden states of the language model, generate a target sentence nearly perfectly (> 99 BLEU) for English sentences from a variety of domains. We show that vector arithmetic can be used for unsupervised sentiment transfer on the Yelp sentiment benchmark, with performance comparable to models tailored to this task. We find that distances between steering vectors reflect sentence similarity when evaluated on a textual similarity benchmark (STS-B), outperforming pooled hidden states of models. Finally, we present an analysis of the intrinsic properties of the steering vectors. Taken together, our results suggest that frozen LMs can be effectively controlled through their latent steering space.

Sentiment analysis is the most basic NLP task to determine the polarity of text data. There has been a significant amount of work in the area of multilingual text as well. Still hate and offensive speech detection faces a challenge due to inadequate availability of data, especially for Indian languages like Hindi and Marathi. In this work, we consider hate and offensive speech detection in Hindi and Marathi texts. The problem is formulated as a text classification task using the state of the art deep learning approaches. We explore different deep learning architectures like CNN, LSTM, and variations of BERT like multilingual BERT, IndicBERT, and monolingual RoBERTa. The basic models based on CNN and LSTM are augmented with fast text word embeddings. We use the HASOC 2021 Hindi and Marathi hate speech datasets to compare these algorithms. The Marathi dataset consists of binary labels and the Hindi dataset consists of binary as well as more-fine grained labels. We show that the transformer-based models perform the best and even the basic models along with FastText embeddings give a competitive performance. Moreover, with normal hyper-parameter tuning, the basic models perform better than BERT-based models on the fine-grained Hindi dataset.

Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how features are represented in these models. We seek to address this issue by applying the idea of mean-centring to steering vectors. We find that taking the average of activations associated with a target dataset, and then subtracting the mean of all training activations, results in effective steering vectors. We test this method on a variety of models on natural language tasks by steering away from generating toxic text, and steering the completion of a story towards a target genre. We also apply mean-centring to extract function vectors, more effectively triggering the execution of a range of natural language tasks by a significant margin (compared to previous baselines). This suggests that mean-centring can be used to easily improve the effectiveness of activation steering in a wide range of contexts.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment towards a specific aspect in the text. However, existing ABSA test sets cannot be used to probe whether a model can distinguish the sentiment of the target aspect from the non-target aspects. To solve this problem, we develop a simple but effective approach to enrich ABSA test sets. Specifically, we generate new examples to disentangle the confounding sentiments of the non-target aspects from the target aspect's sentiment. Based on the SemEval 2014 dataset, we construct the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS) as a comprehensive probe of the aspect robustness of ABSA models. Over 92% data of ARTS show high fluency and desired sentiment on all aspects by human evaluation. Using ARTS, we analyze the robustness of nine ABSA models, and observe, surprisingly, that their accuracy drops by up to 69.73%. We explore several ways to improve aspect robustness, and find that adversarial training can improve models' performance on ARTS by up to 32.85%. Our code and new test set are available at https://github.com/zhijing-jin/ARTS_TestSet

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a major field of study in natural language processing, computational linguistics and information retrieval. Interest in SA has been constantly growing in both academia and industry over the recent years. Moreover, there is an increasing need for generating appropriate resources and datasets in particular for low resource languages including Persian. These datasets play an important role in designing and developing appropriate opinion mining platforms using supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised methods. In this paper, we outline the entire process of developing a manually annotated sentiment corpus, SentiPers, which covers formal and informal written contemporary Persian. To the best of our knowledge, SentiPers is a unique sentiment corpus with such a rich annotation in three different levels including document-level, sentence-level, and entity/aspect-level for Persian. The corpus contains more than 26000 sentences of users opinions from digital product domain and benefits from special characteristics such as quantifying the positiveness or negativity of an opinion through assigning a number within a specific range to any given sentence. Furthermore, we present statistics on various components of our corpus as well as studying the inter-annotator agreement among the annotators. Finally, some of the challenges that we faced during the annotation process will be discussed as well.

Opinion mining is the branch of computation that deals with opinions, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions of people and their different aspects. This field has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. Aspect-level (called aspect-based opinion mining) is often desired in practical applications as it provides detailed opinions or sentiments about different aspects of entities and entities themselves, which are usually required for action. Aspect extraction and entity extraction are thus two core tasks of aspect-based opinion mining. his paper has presented a framework of aspect-based opinion mining based on the concept of transfer learning. on real-world customer reviews available on the Amazon website. The model has yielded quite satisfactory results in its task of aspect-based opinion mining.

The analysis of political biases in large language models (LLMs) has primarily examined these systems as single entities with fixed viewpoints. While various methods exist for measuring such biases, the impact of persona-based prompting on LLMs' political orientation remains unexplored. In this work we leverage PersonaHub, a collection of synthetic persona descriptions, to map the political distribution of persona-based prompted LLMs using the Political Compass Test (PCT). We then examine whether these initial compass distributions can be manipulated through explicit ideological prompting towards diametrically opposed political orientations: right-authoritarian and left-libertarian. Our experiments reveal that synthetic personas predominantly cluster in the left-libertarian quadrant, with models demonstrating varying degrees of responsiveness when prompted with explicit ideological descriptors. While all models demonstrate significant shifts towards right-authoritarian positions, they exhibit more limited shifts towards left-libertarian positions, suggesting an asymmetric response to ideological manipulation that may reflect inherent biases in model training.

In the sentiment attitude extraction task, the aim is to identify <<attitudes>> -- sentiment relations between entities mentioned in text. In this paper, we provide a study on attention-based context encoders in the sentiment attitude extraction task. For this task, we adapt attentive context encoders of two types: (i) feature-based; (ii) self-based. Our experiments with a corpus of Russian analytical texts RuSentRel illustrate that the models trained with attentive encoders outperform ones that were trained without them and achieve 1.5-5.9% increase by F1. We also provide the analysis of attention weight distributions in dependence on the term type.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at automatically inferring the specific sentiment polarities toward certain aspects of products or services behind the social media texts or reviews, which has been a fundamental application to the real-world society. Since the early 2010s, ABSA has achieved extraordinarily high accuracy with various deep neural models. However, existing ABSA models with strong in-house performances may fail to generalize to some challenging cases where the contexts are variable, i.e., low robustness to real-world environments. In this study, we propose to enhance the ABSA robustness by systematically rethinking the bottlenecks from all possible angles, including model, data, and training. First, we strengthen the current best-robust syntax-aware models by further incorporating the rich external syntactic dependencies and the labels with aspect simultaneously with a universal-syntax graph convolutional network. In the corpus perspective, we propose to automatically induce high-quality synthetic training data with various types, allowing models to learn sufficient inductive bias for better robustness. Last, we based on the rich pseudo data perform adversarial training to enhance the resistance to the context perturbation and meanwhile employ contrastive learning to reinforce the representations of instances with contrastive sentiments. Extensive robustness evaluations are conducted. The results demonstrate that our enhanced syntax-aware model achieves better robustness performances than all the state-of-the-art baselines. By additionally incorporating our synthetic corpus, the robust testing results are pushed with around 10% accuracy, which are then further improved by installing the advanced training strategies. In-depth analyses are presented for revealing the factors influencing the ABSA robustness.

In the sentiment attitude extraction task, the aim is to identify <<attitudes>> -- sentiment relations between entities mentioned in text. In this paper, we provide a study on attention-based context encoders in the sentiment attitude extraction task. For this task, we adapt attentive context encoders of two types: (1) feature-based; (2) self-based. In our study, we utilize the corpus of Russian analytical texts RuSentRel and automatically constructed news collection RuAttitudes for enriching the training set. We consider the problem of attitude extraction as two-class (positive, negative) and three-class (positive, negative, neutral) classification tasks for whole documents. Our experiments with the RuSentRel corpus show that the three-class classification models, which employ the RuAttitudes corpus for training, result in 10% increase and extra 3% by F1, when model architectures include the attention mechanism. We also provide the analysis of attention weight distributions in dependence on the term type.

As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged lingusitically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding between them. We aim to make these communities more comprehensible to each other with a framework that probes community-specific responses to the same survey questions using community language models CommunityLM. In our framework we identify committed partisan members for each community on Twitter and fine-tune LMs on the tweets authored by them. We then assess the worldviews of the two groups using prompt-based probing of their corresponding LMs, with prompts that elicit opinions about public figures and groups surveyed by the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. We compare the responses generated by the LMs to the ANES survey results, and find a level of alignment that greatly exceeds several baseline methods. Our work aims to show that we can use community LMs to query the worldview of any group of people given a sufficiently large sample of their social media discussions or media diet.

Predicting market movements based on the sentiment of news media has a long tradition in data analysis. With advances in natural language processing, transformer architectures have emerged that enable contextually aware sentiment classification. Nevertheless, current methods built for the general financial market such as FinBERT cannot distinguish asset-specific value-driving factors. This paper addresses this shortcoming by presenting a method that identifies and classifies events that impact supply and demand in the crude oil markets within a large corpus of relevant news headlines. We then introduce CrudeBERT, a new sentiment analysis model that draws upon these events to contextualize and fine-tune FinBERT, thereby yielding improved sentiment classifications for headlines related to the crude oil futures market. An extensive evaluation demonstrates that CrudeBERT outperforms proprietary and open-source solutions in the domain of crude oil.

Emotion analysis in texts suffers from two major limitations: annotated gold-standard corpora are mostly small and homogeneous, and emotion identification is often simplified as a sentence-level classification problem. To address these issues, we introduce a new annotation scheme for exploring emotions and their causes, along with a new French dataset composed of autobiographical accounts of an emotional scene. The texts were collected by applying the Cognitive Analysis of Emotions developed by A. Finkel to help people improve on their emotion management. The method requires the manual analysis of an emotional event by a coach trained in Cognitive Analysis. We present a rule-based approach to automatically annotate emotions and their semantic roles (e.g. emotion causes) to facilitate the identification of relevant aspects by the coach. We investigate future directions for emotion analysis using graph structures.

We present time vectors, a simple tool to customize language models to new time periods. Time vectors are created by finetuning a language model on data from a single time (e.g., a year or month), and then subtracting the weights of the original pretrained model. This vector specifies a direction in weight space that, as our experiments show, improves performance on text from that time period. Time vectors specialized to adjacent time periods appear to be positioned closer together in a manifold. Using this structure, we interpolate between time vectors to induce new models that perform better on intervening and future time periods, without any additional training. We demonstrate the consistency of our findings across different tasks, domains, model sizes, and time scales. Our results suggest that time is encoded in the weight space of finetuned models.

Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in decoding market trends and guiding strategic trading decisions. Despite the deployment of advanced deep learning techniques and language models to refine sentiment analysis in finance, this study breaks new ground by investigating the potential of large language models, particularly ChatGPT 3.5, in financial sentiment analysis, with a strong emphasis on the foreign exchange market (forex). Employing a zero-shot prompting approach, we examine multiple ChatGPT prompts on a meticulously curated dataset of forex-related news headlines, measuring performance using metrics such as precision, recall, f1-score, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the sentiment class. Additionally, we probe the correlation between predicted sentiment and market returns as an additional evaluation approach. ChatGPT, compared to FinBERT, a well-established sentiment analysis model for financial texts, exhibited approximately 35\% enhanced performance in sentiment classification and a 36\% higher correlation with market returns. By underlining the significance of prompt engineering, particularly in zero-shot contexts, this study spotlights ChatGPT's potential to substantially boost sentiment analysis in financial applications. By sharing the utilized dataset, our intention is to stimulate further research and advancements in the field of financial services.

In the online world, Machine Translation (MT) systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Text (UGT) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author's positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. However, MT systems still lack accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes make critical translation errors that completely flip the sentiment polarity of the target word or phrase and hence delivers a wrong affect message. This is particularly noticeable in texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards such as the dialectical Arabic (DA) used on online platforms. In this research, we aim to improve the translation of sentiment in UGT written in the dialectical versions of the Arabic language to English. Given the scarcity of gold-standard parallel data for DA-EN in the UGT domain, we introduce a semi-supervised approach that exploits both monolingual and parallel data for training an NMT system initialised by a cross-lingual language model trained with supervised and unsupervised modeling objectives. We assess the accuracy of sentiment translation by our proposed system through a numerical 'sentiment-closeness' measure as well as human evaluation. We will show that our semi-supervised MT system can significantly help with correcting sentiment errors detected in the online translation of dialectical Arabic UGT.

Steering language generation towards objectives or away from undesired content has been a long-standing goal in utilizing language models (LM). Recent work has demonstrated reinforcement learning and weighted decoding as effective approaches to achieve a higher level of language control and quality with pros and cons. In this work, we propose a novel critic decoding method for controlled language generation (CriticControl) that combines the strengths of reinforcement learning and weighted decoding. Specifically, we adopt the actor-critic framework to train an LM-steering critic from non-differentiable reward models. And similar to weighted decoding, our method freezes the language model and manipulates the output token distribution using called critic, improving training efficiency and stability. Evaluation of our method on three controlled generation tasks, namely topic control, sentiment control, and detoxification, shows that our approach generates more coherent and well-controlled texts than previous methods. In addition, CriticControl demonstrates superior generalization ability in zero-shot settings. Human evaluation studies also corroborate our findings.

This paper presents KazSAnDRA, a dataset developed for Kazakh sentiment analysis that is the first and largest publicly available dataset of its kind. KazSAnDRA comprises an extensive collection of 180,064 reviews obtained from various sources and includes numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 5, providing a quantitative representation of customer attitudes. The study also pursued the automation of Kazakh sentiment classification through the development and evaluation of four machine learning models trained for both polarity classification and score classification. Experimental analysis included evaluation of the results considering both balanced and imbalanced scenarios. The most successful model attained an F1-score of 0.81 for polarity classification and 0.39 for score classification on the test sets. The dataset and fine-tuned models are open access and available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.

Language model detoxification aims to minimize the risk of generating offensive or harmful content in pretrained language models (PLMs) for safer deployment. Existing methods can be roughly categorized as finetuning-based and decoding-based. However, the former is often resource-intensive, while the latter relies on additional components and potentially compromises the generation fluency. In this paper, we propose a more lightweight approach that enables the PLM itself to achieve "self-detoxification". Our method is built upon the observation that prepending a negative steering prompt can effectively induce PLMs to generate toxic content. At the same time, we are inspired by the recent research in the interpretability field, which formulates the evolving contextualized representations within the PLM as an information stream facilitated by the attention layers. Drawing on this idea, we devise a method to identify the toxification direction from the normal generation process to the one prompted with the negative prefix, and then steer the generation to the reversed direction by manipulating the information movement within the attention layers. Experimental results show that our approach, without any fine-tuning or extra components, can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods.

As AI systems become increasingly prevalent in various aspects of daily life, gaining a comprehensive understanding of public perception towards these AI systems has become increasingly essential for several reasons such as ethical considerations, user experience, fear, disinformation, regulation, collaboration, and co-creation. In this study, we investigate how mass social media users perceive the recent rise of AI frameworks such as ChatGPT. We collect a total of 33,912 comments in 388 unique subreddits spanning from November 30, 2022 to June 8, 2023 using a list of AI-related keywords. We employ BERTopic to uncover the major themes regarding AI on Reddit. Additionally, we seek to gain deeper insights into public opinion by examining the distribution of topics across different subreddits. We observe that technology-related subreddits predominantly focus on the technical aspects of AI models. On the other hand, non-tech subreddits show greater interest in social issues such as concerns about job replacement or furlough. We leverage zero-shot prompting to analyze the sentiment and perception of AI among individual users. Through a comprehensive sentiment and emotion analysis, we discover that tech-centric communities exhibit greater polarization compared to non-tech communities when discussing AI topics. This research contributes to our broader understanding of public opinion surrounding artificial intelligence.

This publication describes the motivation and generation of Q_{bias}, a large dataset of Google and Bing search queries, a scraping tool and dataset for biased news articles, as well as language models for the investigation of bias in online search. Web search engines are a major factor and trusted source in information search, especially in the political domain. However, biased information can influence opinion formation and lead to biased opinions. To interact with search engines, users formulate search queries and interact with search query suggestions provided by the search engines. A lack of datasets on search queries inhibits research on the subject. We use Q_{bias} to evaluate different approaches to fine-tuning transformer-based language models with the goal of producing models capable of biasing text with left and right political stance. Additionally to this work we provided datasets and language models for biasing texts that allow further research on bias in online information search.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has experienced tremendous expansion and diversity due to various shared tasks spanning several languages and fields and organized via SemEval workshops and Germeval. Nonetheless, a few shortcomings still need to be addressed, such as the lack of low-resource language evaluations and the emphasis on sentence-level analysis. To thoroughly assess ABSA techniques in the context of complete reviews, this research presents a novel task, Review-Level Opinion Aspect Sentiment Target (ROAST). ROAST seeks to close the gap between sentence-level and text-level ABSA by identifying every ABSA constituent at the review level. We extend the available datasets to enable ROAST, addressing the drawbacks noted in previous research by incorporating low-resource languages, numerous languages, and a variety of topics. Through this effort, ABSA research will be able to cover more ground and get a deeper comprehension of the task and its practical application in a variety of languages and domains (https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/ROAST-ABSA).

Implicit Sentiment Analysis (ISA) is a crucial research area in natural language processing. Inspired by the idea of large language model Chain of Thought (CoT), this paper introduces a Sentiment Analysis of Thinking (SAoT) framework. The framework first analyzes the implicit aspects and opinions in the text using common sense and thinking chain capabilities. Then, it reflects on the process of implicit sentiment analysis and finally deduces the polarity of sentiment. The model is evaluated on the SemEval 2014 dataset, consisting of 1120 restaurant reviews and 638 laptop reviews. The experimental results demonstrate that the utilization of the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model yields a notable performance improvement. Specifically, on the restaurant dataset, the F1 score reaches 75.27, accompanied by an ISA score of 66.29. Similarly, on the computer dataset, the F1 score achieves 76.50, while the ISA score amounts to 73.46. Comparatively, the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model surpasses the BERTAsp + SCAPt baseline by an average margin of 47.99%.

While sentiment analysis systems try to determine the sentiment polarities of given targets based on the key opinion expressions in input texts, in implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. Thus detecting implicit sentiment requires the common-sense and multi-hop reasoning ability to infer the latent intent of opinion. Inspired by the recent chain-of-thought (CoT) idea, in this work we introduce a Three-hop Reasoning (THOR) CoT framework to mimic the human-like reasoning process for ISA. We design a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion, and finally the sentiment polarity. Our THOR+Flan-T5 (11B) pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup. More strikingly, THOR+GPT3 (175B) boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 on zero-shot setting. Our code is open at https://github.com/scofield7419/THOR-ISA.

Recently, contrastive learning has been shown to be effective in improving pre-trained language models (PLM) to derive high-quality sentence representations. It aims to pull close positive examples to enhance the alignment while push apart irrelevant negatives for the uniformity of the whole representation space. However, previous works mostly adopt in-batch negatives or sample from training data at random. Such a way may cause the sampling bias that improper negatives (e.g. false negatives and anisotropy representations) are used to learn sentence representations, which will hurt the uniformity of the representation space. To address it, we present a new framework DCLR (Debiased Contrastive Learning of unsupervised sentence Representations) to alleviate the influence of these improper negatives. In DCLR, we design an instance weighting method to punish false negatives and generate noise-based negatives to guarantee the uniformity of the representation space. Experiments on seven semantic textual similarity tasks show that our approach is more effective than competitive baselines. Our code and data are publicly available at the link: blue{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DCLR}.

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a "wayward" behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., definition of a different or even a contradictory task), while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.

Text analysis of social media for sentiment, topic analysis, and other analysis depends initially on the selection of keywords and phrases that will be used to create the research corpora. However, keywords that researchers choose may occur infrequently, leading to errors that arise from using small samples. In this paper, we use the capacity for memorization, interpolation, and extrapolation of Transformer Language Models such as the GPT series to learn the linguistic behaviors of a subgroup within larger corpora of Yelp reviews. We then use prompt-based queries to generate synthetic text that can be analyzed to produce insights into specific opinions held by the populations that the models were trained on. Once learned, more specific sentiment queries can be made of the model with high levels of accuracy when compared to traditional keyword searches. We show that even in cases where a specific keyphrase is limited or not present at all in the training corpora, the GPT is able to accurately generate large volumes of text that have the correct sentiment.

We present a novel approach to the problem of text style transfer. Unlike previous approaches requiring style-labeled training data, our method makes use of readily-available unlabeled text by relying on the implicit connection in style between adjacent sentences, and uses labeled data only at inference time. We adapt T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), a strong pretrained text-to-text model, to extract a style vector from text and use it to condition the decoder to perform style transfer. As our label-free training results in a style vector space encoding many facets of style, we recast transfers as "targeted restyling" vector operations that adjust specific attributes of the input while preserving others. We demonstrate that training on unlabeled Amazon reviews data results in a model that is competitive on sentiment transfer, even compared to models trained fully on labeled data. Furthermore, applying our novel method to a diverse corpus of unlabeled web text results in a single model capable of transferring along multiple dimensions of style (dialect, emotiveness, formality, politeness, sentiment) despite no additional training and using only a handful of exemplars at inference time.

We first adopt a human-guided machine learning framework to develop a new dataset for hyperpartisan news title detection with 2,200 manually labeled and 1.8 million machine-labeled titles that were posted from 2014 to the present by nine representative media organizations across three media bias groups - Left, Central, and Right in an active learning manner. The fine-tuned transformer-based language model achieves an overall accuracy of 0.84 and an F1 score of 0.78 on an external validation set. Next, we conduct a computational analysis to quantify the extent and dynamics of partisanship in news titles. While some aspects are as expected, our study reveals new or nuanced differences between the three media groups. We find that overall the Right media tends to use proportionally more hyperpartisan titles. Roughly around the 2016 Presidential Election, the proportions of hyperpartisan titles increased in all media bias groups where the relative increase in the proportion of hyperpartisan titles of the Left media was the most. We identify three major topics including foreign issues, political systems, and societal issues that are suggestive of hyperpartisanship in news titles using logistic regression models and the Shapley values. Through an analysis of the topic distribution, we find that societal issues gradually receive more attention from all media groups. We further apply a lexicon-based language analysis tool to the titles of each topic and quantify the linguistic distance between any pairs of the three media groups. Three distinct patterns are discovered. The Left media is linguistically more different from Central and Right in terms of foreign issues. The linguistic distance between the three media groups becomes smaller over recent years. In addition, a seasonal pattern where linguistic difference is associated with elections is observed for societal issues.

Urban mobility and transportation systems have been profoundly transformed by the advancement of autonomous vehicle technologies. Baidu Apollo Go, a pioneer robotaxi service from the Chinese tech giant Baidu, has recently been widely deployed in major cities like Beijing and Wuhan, sparking increased conversation and offering a glimpse into the future of urban mobility. This study investigates public attitudes towards Apollo Go across China using Sentiment Analysis with a hybrid BERT model on 36,096 Weibo posts from January to July 2024. The analysis shows that 89.56\% of posts related to Apollo Go are clustered in July. From January to July, public sentiment was mostly positive, but negative comments began to rise after it became a hot topic on July 21. Spatial analysis indicates a strong correlation between provinces with high discussion intensity and those where Apollo Go operates. Initially, Hubei and Guangdong dominated online posting volume, but by July, Guangdong, Beijing, and international regions had overtaken Hubei. Attitudes varied significantly among provinces, with Xinjiang and Qinghai showing optimism and Tibet and Gansu expressing concerns about the impact on traditional taxi services. Sentiment analysis revealed that positive comments focused on technology applications and personal experiences, while negative comments centered on job displacement and safety concerns. In summary, this study highlights the divergence in public perceptions of autonomous ride-hailing services, providing valuable insights for planners, policymakers, and service providers. The model is published on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/wsqstar/bert-finetuned-weibo-luobokuaipao and the repository on GitHub at https://github.com/GIStudio/trb2024.

Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources, including news, discussion forums, books, and online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes opinions and perspectives which, on one hand, celebrate democracy and diversity of ideas, and on the other hand are inherently socially biased. Our work develops new methods to (1) measure political biases in LMs trained on such corpora, along social and economic axes, and (2) measure the fairness of downstream NLP models trained on top of politically biased LMs. We focus on hate speech and misinformation detection, aiming to empirically quantify the effects of political (social, economic) biases in pretraining data on the fairness of high-stakes social-oriented tasks. Our findings reveal that pretrained LMs do have political leanings that reinforce the polarization present in pretraining corpora, propagating social biases into hate speech predictions and misinformation detectors. We discuss the implications of our findings for NLP research and propose future directions to mitigate unfairness.

Texts can convey several types of inter-related information concerning opinions and attitudes. Such information includes the author's attitude towards mentioned entities, attitudes of the entities towards each other, positive and negative effects on the entities in the described situations. In this paper, we described the lexicon RuSentiFrames for Russian, where predicate words and expressions are collected and linked to so-called sentiment frames conveying several types of presupposed information on attitudes and effects. We applied the created frames in the task of extracting attitudes from a large news collection.

Recent advancements in general-purpose AI have highlighted the importance of guiding AI systems towards the intended goals, ethical principles, and values of individuals and groups, a concept broadly recognized as alignment. However, the lack of clarified definitions and scopes of human-AI alignment poses a significant obstacle, hampering collaborative efforts across research domains to achieve this alignment. In particular, ML- and philosophy-oriented alignment research often views AI alignment as a static, unidirectional process (i.e., aiming to ensure that AI systems' objectives match humans) rather than an ongoing, mutual alignment problem [429]. This perspective largely neglects the long-term interaction and dynamic changes of alignment. To understand these gaps, we introduce a systematic review of over 400 papers published between 2019 and January 2024, spanning multiple domains such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and others. We characterize, define and scope human-AI alignment. From this, we present a conceptual framework of "Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment" to organize the literature from a human-centered perspective. This framework encompasses both 1) conventional studies of aligning AI to humans that ensures AI produces the intended outcomes determined by humans, and 2) a proposed concept of aligning humans to AI, which aims to help individuals and society adjust to AI advancements both cognitively and behaviorally. Additionally, we articulate the key findings derived from literature analysis, including discussions about human values, interaction techniques, and evaluations. To pave the way for future studies, we envision three key challenges for future directions and propose examples of potential future solutions.

Subjectivity is the expression of internal opinions or beliefs which cannot be objectively observed or verified, and has been shown to be important for sentiment analysis and word-sense disambiguation. Furthermore, subjectivity is an important aspect of user-generated data. In spite of this, subjectivity has not been investigated in contexts where such data is widespread, such as in question answering (QA). We therefore investigate the relationship between subjectivity and QA, while developing a new dataset. We compare and contrast with analyses from previous work, and verify that findings regarding subjectivity still hold when using recently developed NLP architectures. We find that subjectivity is also an important feature in the case of QA, albeit with more intricate interactions between subjectivity and QA performance. For instance, a subjective question may or may not be associated with a subjective answer. We release an English QA dataset (SubjQA) based on customer reviews, containing subjectivity annotations for questions and answer spans across 6 distinct domains.

User-generated contents (UGCs) on online platforms allow marketing researchers to understand consumer preferences for products and services. With the advance of large language models (LLMs), some studies utilized the models for annotation and sentiment analysis. However, the relationship between the accuracy and the hyper-parameters of LLMs is yet to be thoroughly examined. In addition, the issues of variability and reproducibility of results from each trial of LLMs have rarely been considered in existing literature. Since actual human annotation uses majority voting to resolve disagreements among annotators, this study introduces a majority voting mechanism to a sentiment analysis model using local LLMs. By a series of three analyses of online reviews on restaurant evaluations, we demonstrate that majority voting with multiple attempts using a medium-sized model produces more robust results than using a large model with a single attempt. Furthermore, we conducted further analysis to investigate the effect of each aspect on the overall evaluation.

While sentiment analysis has become an established field in the NLP community, research into languages other than English has been hindered by the lack of resources. Although much research in multi-lingual and cross-lingual sentiment analysis has focused on unsupervised or semi-supervised approaches, these still require a large number of resources and do not reach the performance of supervised approaches. With this in mind, we introduce two datasets for supervised aspect-level sentiment analysis in Basque and Catalan, both of which are under-resourced languages. We provide high-quality annotations and benchmarks with the hope that they will be useful to the growing community of researchers working on these languages.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

Though notable progress has been made, neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) models are prone to learn spurious correlations from annotation biases, resulting in poor robustness on adversarial data transformations. Among the debiasing solutions, causal inference-based methods have attracted much research attention, which can be mainly categorized into causal intervention methods and counterfactual reasoning methods. However, most of the present debiasing methods focus on single-variable causal inference, which is not suitable for ABSA with two input variables (the target aspect and the review). In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on multi-variable causal inference for debiasing ABSA. In this framework, different types of biases are tackled based on different causal intervention methods. For the review branch, the bias is modeled as indirect confounding from context, where backdoor adjustment intervention is employed for debiasing. For the aspect branch, the bias is described as a direct correlation with labels, where counterfactual reasoning is adopted for debiasing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to various baselines on the two widely used real-world aspect robustness test set datasets.

Sentiment analysis is a highly subjective and challenging task. Its complexity further increases when applied to the Arabic language, mainly because of the large variety of dialects that are unstandardized and widely used in the Web, especially in social media. While many datasets have been released to train sentiment classifiers in Arabic, most of these datasets contain shallow annotation, only marking the sentiment of the text unit, as a word, a sentence or a document. In this paper, we present the Arabic Sentiment Twitter Dataset for the Levantine dialect (ArSenTD-LEV). Based on findings from analyzing tweets from the Levant region, we created a dataset of 4,000 tweets with the following annotations: the overall sentiment of the tweet, the target to which the sentiment was expressed, how the sentiment was expressed, and the topic of the tweet. Results confirm the importance of these annotations at improving the performance of a baseline sentiment classifier. They also confirm the gap of training in a certain domain, and testing in another domain.

We introduce PerSenT, a dataset of crowd-sourced annotations of the sentiment expressed by the authors towards the main entities in news articles. The dataset also includes paragraph-level sentiment annotations to provide more fine-grained supervision for the task. Our benchmarks of multiple strong baselines show that this is a difficult classification task. The results also suggest that simply fine-tuning document-level representations from BERT isn't adequate for this task. Making paragraph-level decisions and aggregating them over the entire document is also ineffective. We present empirical and qualitative analyses that illustrate the specific challenges posed by this dataset. We release this dataset with 5.3k documents and 38k paragraphs covering 3.2k unique entities as a challenge in entity sentiment analysis.

Recently, ChatGPT has drawn great attention from both the research community and the public. We are particularly curious about whether it can serve as a universal sentiment analyzer. To this end, in this work, we provide a preliminary evaluation of ChatGPT on the understanding of opinions, sentiments, and emotions contained in the text. Specifically, we evaluate it in four settings, including standard evaluation, polarity shift evaluation, open-domain evaluation, and sentiment inference evaluation. The above evaluation involves 18 benchmark datasets and 5 representative sentiment analysis tasks, and we compare ChatGPT with fine-tuned BERT and corresponding state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on end-task. Moreover, we also conduct human evaluation and present some qualitative case studies to gain a deep comprehension of its sentiment analysis capabilities.

This research explores the application of large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets for Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT) testing, a key component in evaluating user sentiment and product experience. Utilizing gpt-4o-mini, a cost-effective alternative to larger commercial LLMs, three methods, Word+Review, Review+Word, and Supply-Word, were each used to synthesize 1000 product reviews. The generated datasets were assessed for sentiment alignment, textual diversity, and data generation cost. Results demonstrated high sentiment alignment across all methods, with Pearson correlations ranging from 0.93 to 0.97. Supply-Word exhibited the highest diversity and coverage of PDT terms, although with increased generation costs. Despite minor biases toward positive sentiments, in situations with limited test data, LLM-generated synthetic data offers significant advantages, including scalability, cost savings, and flexibility in dataset production.

Visual-textual sentiment analysis aims to predict sentiment with the input of a pair of image and text. The main challenge of visual-textual sentiment analysis is how to learn effective visual features for sentiment prediction since input images are often very diverse. To address this challenge, we propose a new method that improves visual-textual sentiment analysis by introducing powerful expert visual features. The proposed method consists of four parts: (1) a visual-textual branch to learn features directly from data for sentiment analysis, (2) a visual expert branch with a set of pre-trained "expert" encoders to extract effective visual features, (3) a CLIP branch to implicitly model visual-textual correspondence, and (4) a multimodal feature fusion network based on either BERT or MLP to fuse multimodal features and make sentiment prediction. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our method produces better visual-textual sentiment analysis performance than existing methods.

This paper shows how LLMs (Large Language Models) may be used to estimate a summary of the emotional state associated with piece of text. The summary of emotional state is a dictionary of words used to describe emotion together with the probability of the word appearing after a prompt comprising the original text and an emotion eliciting tail. Through emotion analysis of Amazon product reviews we demonstrate emotion descriptors can be mapped into a PCA type space. It was hoped that text descriptions of actions to improve a current text described state could also be elicited through a tail prompt. Experiment seemed to indicate that this is not straightforward to make work. This failure put our hoped for selection of action via choosing the best predict ed outcome via comparing emotional responses out of reach for the moment.

AI alignment aims to make AI systems behave in line with human intentions and values. As AI systems grow more capable, so do risks from misalignment. To provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the alignment field, in this survey, we delve into the core concepts, methodology, and practice of alignment. First, we identify four principles as the key objectives of AI alignment: Robustness, Interpretability, Controllability, and Ethicality (RICE). Guided by these four principles, we outline the landscape of current alignment research and decompose them into two key components: forward alignment and backward alignment. The former aims to make AI systems aligned via alignment training, while the latter aims to gain evidence about the systems' alignment and govern them appropriately to avoid exacerbating misalignment risks. On forward alignment, we discuss techniques for learning from feedback and learning under distribution shift. On backward alignment, we discuss assurance techniques and governance practices. We also release and continually update the website (www.alignmentsurvey.com) which features tutorials, collections of papers, blog posts, and other resources.

We study the task of long-form opinion text generation, which faces at least two distinct challenges. First, existing neural generation models fall short of coherence, thus requiring efficient content planning. Second, diverse types of information are needed to guide the generator to cover both subjective and objective content. To this end, we propose DYPLOC, a generation framework that conducts dynamic planning of content while generating the output based on a novel design of mixed language models. To enrich the generation with diverse content, we further propose to use large pre-trained models to predict relevant concepts and to generate claims. We experiment with two challenging tasks on newly collected datasets: (1) argument generation with Reddit ChangeMyView, and (2) writing articles using New York Times' Opinion section. Automatic evaluation shows that our model significantly outperforms competitive comparisons. Human judges further confirm that our generations are more coherent with richer content.

Memes have become a distinctive and effective form of communication in the digital era, attracting online communities and cutting across cultural barriers. Even though memes are frequently linked with humor, they have an amazing capacity to convey a wide range of emotions, including happiness, sarcasm, frustration, and more. Understanding and interpreting the sentiment underlying memes has become crucial in the age of information. Previous research has explored text-based, image-based, and multimodal approaches, leading to the development of models like CAPSAN and PromptHate for detecting various meme categories. However, the study of low-resource languages like Bengali memes remains scarce, with limited availability of publicly accessible datasets. A recent contribution includes the introduction of the MemoSen dataset. However, the achieved accuracy is notably low, and the dataset suffers from imbalanced distribution. In this study, we employed a multimodal approach using ResNet50 and BanglishBERT and achieved a satisfactory result of 0.71 weighted F1-score, performed comparison with unimodal approaches, and interpreted behaviors of the models using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques.

We introduce DynaSent ('Dynamic Sentiment'), a new English-language benchmark task for ternary (positive/negative/neutral) sentiment analysis. DynaSent combines naturally occurring sentences with sentences created using the open-source Dynabench Platform, which facilities human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset creation. DynaSent has a total of 121,634 sentences, each validated by five crowdworkers, and its development and test splits are designed to produce chance performance for even the best models we have been able to develop; when future models solve this task, we will use them to create DynaSent version 2, continuing the dynamic evolution of this benchmark. Here, we report on the dataset creation effort, focusing on the steps we took to increase quality and reduce artifacts. We also present evidence that DynaSent's Neutral category is more coherent than the comparable category in other benchmarks, and we motivate training models from scratch for each round over successive fine-tuning.

We explore the task of predicting the leading political ideology or bias of news articles. First, we collect and release a large dataset of 34,737 articles that were manually annotated for political ideology -left, center, or right-, which is well-balanced across both topics and media. We further use a challenging experimental setup where the test examples come from media that were not seen during training, which prevents the model from learning to detect the source of the target news article instead of predicting its political ideology. From a modeling perspective, we propose an adversarial media adaptation, as well as a specially adapted triplet loss. We further add background information about the source, and we show that it is quite helpful for improving article-level prediction. Our experimental results show very sizable improvements over using state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformers in this challenging setup.

Temporal sentence grounding aims to localize moments relevant to a language description. Recently, DETR-like approaches achieved notable progress by predicting the center and length of a target moment. However, they suffer from the issue of center misalignment raised by the inherent ambiguity of moment centers, leading to inaccurate predictions. To remedy this problem, we propose a novel boundary-oriented moment formulation. In our paradigm, the model no longer needs to find the precise center but instead suffices to predict any anchor point within the interval, from which the boundaries are directly estimated. Based on this idea, we design a boundary-aligned moment detection transformer, equipped with a dual-pathway decoding process. Specifically, it refines the anchor and boundaries within parallel pathways using global and boundary-focused attention, respectively. This separate design allows the model to focus on desirable regions, enabling precise refinement of moment predictions. Further, we propose a quality-based ranking method, ensuring that proposals with high localization qualities are prioritized over incomplete ones. Experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Pilhyeon/BAM-DETR.

Telling stories is an integral part of human communication which can evoke emotions and influence the affective states of the audience. Automatically modeling emotional trajectories in stories has thus attracted considerable scholarly interest. However, as most existing works have been limited to unsupervised dictionary-based approaches, there is no benchmark for this task. We address this gap by introducing continuous valence and arousal labels for an existing dataset of children's stories originally annotated with discrete emotion categories. We collect additional annotations for this data and map the categorical labels to the continuous valence and arousal space. For predicting the thus obtained emotionality signals, we fine-tune a DeBERTa model and improve upon this baseline via a weakly supervised learning approach. The best configuration achieves a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of .8221 for valence and .7125 for arousal on the test set, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approach. A detailed analysis shows the extent to which the results vary depending on factors such as the author, the individual story, or the section within the story. In addition, we uncover the weaknesses of our approach by investigating examples that prove to be difficult to predict.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these methods affect model behavior remains an open question. Our work provides an initial attempt to theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of human preference alignment. We formally show how the distribution of preference datasets influences the rate of model updates and provide rigorous guarantees on the training accuracy. Our theory also reveals an intricate phenomenon where the optimization is prone to prioritizing certain behaviors with higher preference distinguishability. We empirically validate our findings on contemporary LLMs and alignment tasks, reinforcing our theoretical insights and shedding light on considerations for future alignment approaches. Disclaimer: This paper contains potentially offensive text; reader discretion is advised.

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text generation. We show that style vectors can be simply computed from recorded layer activations for input texts in a specific style in contrast to more complex training-based approaches. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of activation engineering using such style vectors to influence the style of generated text in a nuanced and parameterisable way, distinguishing it from prompt engineering. The presented research constitutes a significant step towards developing more adaptive and effective AI-empowered interactive systems.

Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, pro-environmental action, political engagement, and even participation in violent protests. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but in order to achieve better performances in such subjective tasks, large sets of hand-annotated training data are needed. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We use a range of methodologies to provide baseline moral-sentiment classification results for this new corpus, e.g., cross-domain classification and knowledge transfer.

Due to the exponentially increasing reach of social media, it is essential to focus on its negative aspects as it can potentially divide society and incite people into violence. In this paper, we present our system description of work on the shared task ComMA@ICON, where we have to classify how aggressive the sentence is and if the sentence is gender-biased or communal biased. These three could be the primary reasons to cause significant problems in society. As team Hypers we have proposed an approach that utilizes different pretrained models with Attention and mean pooling methods. We were able to get Rank 3 with 0.223 Instance F1 score on Bengali, Rank 2 with 0.322 Instance F1 score on Multi-lingual set, Rank 4 with 0.129 Instance F1 score on Meitei and Rank 5 with 0.336 Instance F1 score on Hindi. The source code and the pretrained models of this work can be found here.

Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact the others. In this work, we focus on analyzing the relationship between two concepts essential in both language model alignment and political science: truthfulness and political bias. We train reward models on various popular truthfulness datasets and subsequently evaluate their political bias. Our findings reveal that optimizing reward models for truthfulness on these datasets tends to result in a left-leaning political bias. We also find that existing open-source reward models (i.e. those trained on standard human preference datasets) already show a similar bias and that the bias is larger for larger models. These results raise important questions about both the datasets used to represent truthfulness and what language models capture about the relationship between truth and politics.

The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers' emotions by mining crowd-generated content within social software engineering tools. However, off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools have been trained on non-technical domains and general-purpose social media, thus resulting in misclassifications of technical jargon and problem reports. Here, we present Senti4SD, a classifier specifically trained to support sentiment analysis in developers' communication channels. Senti4SD is trained and validated using a gold standard of Stack Overflow questions, answers, and comments manually annotated for sentiment polarity. It exploits a suite of both lexicon- and keyword-based features, as well as semantic features based on word embedding. With respect to a mainstream off-the-shelf tool, which we use as a baseline, Senti4SD reduces the misclassifications of neutral and positive posts as emotionally negative. To encourage replications, we release a lab package including the classifier, the word embedding space, and the gold standard with annotation guidelines.

Online reviews play a pivotal role in influencing consumer decisions across various domains, from purchasing products to selecting hotels or restaurants. However, the sheer volume of reviews -- often containing repetitive or irrelevant content -- leads to information overload, making it challenging for users to extract meaningful insights. Traditional opinion summarization models face challenges in handling long inputs and large volumes of reviews, while newer Large Language Model (LLM) approaches often fail to generate accurate and faithful summaries. To address those challenges, this paper introduces (1) a new dataset of long-form user reviews, each entity comprising over a thousand reviews, (2) two training-free LLM-based summarization approaches that scale to long inputs, and (3) automatic evaluation metrics. Our dataset of user reviews is paired with in-depth and unbiased critical summaries by domain experts, serving as a reference for evaluation. Additionally, our novel reference-free evaluation metrics provide a more granular, context-sensitive assessment of summary faithfulness. We benchmark several open-source and closed-source LLMs using our methods. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs still face challenges in balancing sentiment and format adherence in long-form summaries, though open-source models can narrow the gap when relevant information is retrieved in a focused manner.

Numerous methods have been developed to monitor the spread of negativity in modern years by eliminating vulgar, offensive, and fierce comments from social media platforms. However, there are relatively lesser amounts of study that converges on embracing positivity, reinforcing supportive and reassuring content in online forums. Consequently, we propose creating an English-Kannada Hope speech dataset, KanHope and comparing several experiments to benchmark the dataset. The dataset consists of 6,176 user-generated comments in code mixed Kannada scraped from YouTube and manually annotated as bearing hope speech or Not-hope speech. In addition, we introduce DC-BERT4HOPE, a dual-channel model that uses the English translation of KanHope for additional training to promote hope speech detection. The approach achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.756, bettering other models. Henceforth, KanHope aims to instigate research in Kannada while broadly promoting researchers to take a pragmatic approach towards online content that encourages, positive, and supportive.

Despite impressive advancements in multilingual corpora collection and model training, developing large-scale deployments of multilingual models still presents a significant challenge. This is particularly true for language tasks that are culture-dependent. One such example is the area of multilingual sentiment analysis, where affective markers can be subtle and deeply ensconced in culture. This work presents the most extensive open massively multilingual corpus of datasets for training sentiment models. The corpus consists of 79 manually selected datasets from over 350 datasets reported in the scientific literature based on strict quality criteria. The corpus covers 27 languages representing 6 language families. Datasets can be queried using several linguistic and functional features. In addition, we present a multi-faceted sentiment classification benchmark summarizing hundreds of experiments conducted on different base models, training objectives, dataset collections, and fine-tuning strategies.

Feeling emotion is a critical characteristic to distinguish people from machines. Among all the multi-modal resources for emotion detection, textual datasets are those containing the least additional information in addition to semantics, and hence are adopted widely for testing the developed systems. However, most of the textual emotional datasets consist of emotion labels of only individual words, sentences or documents, which makes it challenging to discuss the contextual flow of emotions. In this paper, we introduce EmotionLines, the first dataset with emotions labeling on all utterances in each dialogue only based on their textual content. Dialogues in EmotionLines are collected from Friends TV scripts and private Facebook messenger dialogues. Then one of seven emotions, six Ekman's basic emotions plus the neutral emotion, is labeled on each utterance by 5 Amazon MTurkers. A total of 29,245 utterances from 2,000 dialogues are labeled in EmotionLines. We also provide several strong baselines for emotion detection models on EmotionLines in this paper.

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

We propose a method for unsupervised opinion summarization that encodes sentences from customer reviews into a hierarchical discrete latent space, then identifies common opinions based on the frequency of their encodings. We are able to generate both abstractive summaries by decoding these frequent encodings, and extractive summaries by selecting the sentences assigned to the same frequent encodings. Our method is attributable, because the model identifies sentences used to generate the summary as part of the summarization process. It scales easily to many hundreds of input reviews, because aggregation is performed in the latent space rather than over long sequences of tokens. We also demonstrate that our appraoch enables a degree of control, generating aspect-specific summaries by restricting the model to parts of the encoding space that correspond to desired aspects (e.g., location or food). Automatic and human evaluation on two datasets from different domains demonstrates that our method generates summaries that are more informative than prior work and better grounded in the input reviews.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which focuses on detecting the sentiment polarity towards the aspect in a sentence. However, it is always sensitive to the multi-aspect challenge, where features of multiple aspects in a sentence will affect each other. To mitigate this issue, we design a novel training framework, called Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation (C3 DA), which leverages an in-domain generator to construct more multi-aspect samples and then boosts the robustness of ABSA models via contrastive learning on these generated data. In practice, given a generative pretrained language model and some limited ABSA labeled data, we first employ some parameter-efficient approaches to perform the in-domain fine-tuning. Then, the obtained in-domain generator is used to generate the synthetic sentences from two channels, i.e., Aspect Augmentation Channel and Polarity Augmentation Channel, which generate the sentence condition on a given aspect and polarity respectively. Specifically, our C3 DA performs the sentence generation in a cross-channel manner to obtain more sentences, and proposes an Entropy-Minimization Filter to filter low-quality generated samples. Extensive experiments show that our C3 DA can outperform those baselines without any augmentations by about 1% on accuracy and Macro- F1. Code and data are released in https://github.com/wangbing1416/C3DA.

We introduce a new language representation model in finance called Financial Embedding Analysis of Sentiment (FinEAS). In financial markets, news and investor sentiment are significant drivers of security prices. Thus, leveraging the capabilities of modern NLP approaches for financial sentiment analysis is a crucial component in identifying patterns and trends that are useful for market participants and regulators. In recent years, methods that use transfer learning from large Transformer-based language models like BERT, have achieved state-of-the-art results in text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis using labelled datasets. Researchers have quickly adopted these approaches to financial texts, but best practices in this domain are not well-established. In this work, we propose a new model for financial sentiment analysis based on supervised fine-tuned sentence embeddings from a standard BERT model. We demonstrate our approach achieves significant improvements in comparison to vanilla BERT, LSTM, and FinBERT, a financial domain specific BERT.

This study explores the use of LLMs for providing quantitative zero-shot sentiment analysis of implicit software desirability, addressing a critical challenge in product evaluation where traditional review scores, though convenient, fail to capture the richness of qualitative user feedback. Innovations include establishing a method that 1) works with qualitative user experience data without the need for explicit review scores, 2) focuses on implicit user satisfaction, and 3) provides scaled numerical sentiment analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of user sentiment, instead of simply classifying sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative. Data is collected using the Microsoft Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT), a well-known qualitative user experience analysis tool. For initial exploration, the PDT metric was given to users of two software systems. PDT data was fed through several LLMs (Claude Sonnet 3 and 3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) and through a leading transfer learning technique, Twitter-Roberta-Base-Sentiment, and Vader, a leading sentiment analysis tool. Each system was asked to evaluate the data in two ways, by looking at the sentiment expressed in the PDT word/explanation pairs; and by looking at the sentiment expressed by the users in their grouped selection of five words and explanations, as a whole. Each LLM provided a sentiment score, its confidence (low, medium, high) in the score, and an explanation of the score. All LLMs tested were able to statistically detect user sentiment from the users' grouped data, whereas TRBS and Vader were not. The confidence and explanation of confidence provided by the LLMs assisted in understanding user sentiment. This study adds deeper understanding of evaluating user experiences, toward the goal of creating a universal tool that quantifies implicit sentiment.

The success of the reward model in distinguishing between responses with subtle safety differences depends critically on the high-quality preference dataset, which should capture the fine-grained nuances of harmful and harmless responses. This motivates the need to develop a dataset involving preference margins, which accurately quantify how harmless one response is compared to another. In this paper, we take the first step to propose an effective and cost-efficient framework to promote the margin-enhanced preference dataset development. Our framework, Legend, Leverages representation engineering to annotate preference datasets. It constructs the specific direction within the LLM's embedding space that represents safety. By leveraging this safety direction, Legend can then leverage the semantic distances of paired responses along this direction to annotate margins automatically. We experimentally demonstrate our effectiveness in both reward modeling and harmless alignment for LLMs. Legend also stands out for its efficiency, requiring only the inference time rather than additional training. This efficiency allows for easier implementation and scalability, making Legend particularly valuable for practical applications in aligning LLMs with safe conversations.

There are many settings where it is useful to predict and explain the success or failure of a dialogue. Circumplex theory from psychology models the social orientations (e.g., Warm-Agreeable, Arrogant-Calculating) of conversation participants and can be used to predict and explain the outcome of social interactions. Our work is novel in its systematic application of social orientation tags to modeling conversation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a new data set of dialogue utterances machine-labeled with social orientation tags. We show that social orientation tags improve task performance, especially in low-resource settings, on both English and Chinese language benchmarks. We also demonstrate how social orientation tags help explain the outcomes of social interactions when used in neural models. Based on these results showing the utility of social orientation tags for dialogue outcome prediction tasks, we release our data sets, code, and models that are fine-tuned to predict social orientation tags on dialogue utterances.

Based on the WASSA 2022 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification, we predict the level of empathic concern and personal distress displayed in essays. For the first stage of this project we implemented a Feed-Forward Neural Network using sentence-level embeddings as features. We experimented with four different embedding models for generating the inputs to the neural network. The subsequent stage builds upon the previous work and we have implemented three types of revisions. The first revision focuses on the enhancements to the model architecture and the training approach. The second revision focuses on handling class imbalance using stratified data sampling. The third revision focuses on leveraging lexical resources, where we apply four different resources to enrich the features associated with the dataset. During the final stage of this project, we have created the final end-to-end system for the primary task using an ensemble of models to revise primary task performance. Additionally, as part of the final stage, these approaches have been adapted to the WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy Emotion and Personality Detection in Interactions, in which the empathic concern, emotion polarity, and emotion intensity in dyadic text conversations are predicted.

Language models now constitute essential tools for improving efficiency for many professional tasks such as writing, coding, or learning. For this reason, it is imperative to identify inherent biases. In the field of Natural Language Processing, five sources of bias are well-identified: data, annotation, representation, models, and research design. This study focuses on biases related to geographical knowledge. We explore the connection between geography and language models by highlighting their tendency to misrepresent spatial information, thus leading to distortions in the representation of geographical distances. This study introduces four indicators to assess these distortions, by comparing geographical and semantic distances. Experiments are conducted from these four indicators with ten widely used language models. Results underscore the critical necessity of inspecting and rectifying spatial biases in language models to ensure accurate and equitable representations.

Entity-level fine-grained sentiment analysis in the financial domain is a crucial subtask of sentiment analysis and currently faces numerous challenges. The primary challenge stems from the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated corpora specifically designed for financial text sentiment analysis, which in turn limits the availability of data necessary for developing effective text processing techniques. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks, primarily centered around language pattern matching. In this paper, we propose a novel and extensive Chinese fine-grained financial sentiment analysis dataset, FinChina SA, for enterprise early warning. We thoroughly evaluate and experiment with well-known existing open-source LLMs using our dataset. We firmly believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource to advance the exploration of real-world financial sentiment analysis tasks, which should be the focus of future research. The FinChina SA dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/YerayL/FinChina-SA

In this paper, we present a computational analysis of the Persian language Twitter discourse with the aim to estimate the shift in stance toward gender equality following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. We present an ensemble active learning pipeline to train a stance classifier. Our novelty lies in the involvement of Iranian women in an active role as annotators in building this AI system. Our annotators not only provide labels, but they also suggest valuable keywords for more meaningful corpus creation as well as provide short example documents for a guided sampling step. Our analyses indicate that Mahsa Amini's death triggered polarized Persian language discourse where both fractions of negative and positive tweets toward gender equality increased. The increase in positive tweets was slightly greater than the increase in negative tweets. We also observe that with respect to account creation time, between the state-aligned Twitter accounts and pro-protest Twitter accounts, pro-protest accounts are more similar to baseline Persian Twitter activity.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a natural language processing problem that requires analyzing user-generated reviews to determine: a) The target entity being reviewed, b) The high-level aspect to which it belongs, and c) The sentiment expressed toward the targets and the aspects. Numerous yet scattered corpora for ABSA make it difficult for researchers to identify corpora best suited for a specific ABSA subtask quickly. This study aims to present a database of corpora that can be used to train and assess autonomous ABSA systems. Additionally, we provide an overview of the major corpora for ABSA and its subtasks and highlight several features that researchers should consider when selecting a corpus. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of current collection approaches and make recommendations for future corpora creation. This survey examines 65 publicly available ABSA datasets covering over 25 domains, including 45 English and 20 other languages datasets.

Stickers are increasingly used in social media to express sentiment and intent. When finding typing troublesome, people often use a sticker instead. Despite the significant impact of stickers on sentiment analysis and intent recognition, little research has been conducted. To address this gap, we propose a new task: Multimodal chat Sentiment Analysis and Intent Recognition involving Stickers (MSAIRS). Additionally, we introduce a novel multimodal dataset containing Chinese chat records and stickers excerpted from several mainstream social media platforms. Our dataset includes paired data with the same text but different stickers, and various stickers consisting of the same images with different texts, allowing us to better understand the impact of stickers on chat sentiment and intent. We also propose an effective multimodal joint model, MMSAIR, for our task, which is validated on our datasets and indicates that visual information of stickers counts. Our dataset and code will be publicly available.

We examine the potential of ChatGPT and other large language models in predicting stock market returns using news headlines. We use ChatGPT to assess whether each headline is good, bad, or neutral for firms' stock prices. We document a significantly positive correlation between ChatGPT scores and subsequent daily stock returns. We find that ChatGPT outperforms traditional sentiment analysis methods. More basic models such as GPT-1, GPT-2, and BERT cannot accurately forecast returns, indicating return predictability is an emerging capacity of complex language models. Long-short strategies based on ChatGPT-4 deliver the highest Sharpe ratio. Furthermore, we find predictability in both small and large stocks, suggesting market underreaction to company news. Predictability is stronger among smaller stocks and stocks with bad news, consistent with limits-to-arbitrage also playing an important role. Finally, we propose a new method to evaluate and understand the models' reasoning capabilities. Overall, our results suggest that incorporating advanced language models into the investment decision-making process can yield more accurate predictions and enhance the performance of quantitative trading strategies.

The analysis of consumer sentiment, as expressed through reviews, can provide a wealth of insight regarding the quality of a product. While the study of sentiment analysis has been widely explored in many popular languages, relatively less attention has been given to the Bangla language, mostly due to a lack of relevant data and cross-domain adaptability. To address this limitation, we present BanglaBook, a large-scale dataset of Bangla book reviews consisting of 158,065 samples classified into three broad categories: positive, negative, and neutral. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of machine learning models to establish baselines including SVM, LSTM, and Bangla-BERT. Our findings demonstrate a substantial performance advantage of pre-trained models over models that rely on manually crafted features, emphasizing the necessity for additional training resources in this domain. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth error analysis by examining sentiment unigrams, which may provide insight into common classification errors in under-resourced languages like Bangla. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/mohsinulkabir14/BanglaBook.

Food choice is a complex phenomenon shaped by factors such as taste, ambience, culture or weather. In this paper, we explore food-related tweeting in different weather conditions. We inspect a Latvian food tweet dataset spanning the past decade in conjunction with a weather observation dataset consisting of average temperature, precipitation, and other phenomena. We find which weather conditions lead to specific food information sharing; automatically classify tweet sentiment and discuss how it changes depending on the weather. This research contributes to the growing area of large-scale social network data understanding of food consumers' choices and perceptions.

As natural language processing methods are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios such as healthcare, legal systems, and social science, it becomes necessary to recognize the role they potentially play in shaping social biases and stereotypes. Previous work has revealed the presence of social biases in widely used word embeddings involving gender, race, religion, and other social constructs. While some methods were proposed to debias these word-level embeddings, there is a need to perform debiasing at the sentence-level given the recent shift towards new contextualized sentence representations such as ELMo and BERT. In this paper, we investigate the presence of social biases in sentence-level representations and propose a new method, Sent-Debias, to reduce these biases. We show that Sent-Debias is effective in removing biases, and at the same time, preserves performance on sentence-level downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis, linguistic acceptability, and natural language understanding. We hope that our work will inspire future research on characterizing and removing social biases from widely adopted sentence representations for fairer NLP.

Recent developments in generative AI have shone a spotlight on high-performance synthetic text generation technologies. The now wide availability and ease of use of such models highlights the urgent need to provide equally powerful technologies capable of identifying synthetic text. With this in mind, we draw inspiration from psychological studies which suggest that people can be driven by emotion and encode emotion in the text they compose. We hypothesize that pretrained language models (PLMs) have an affective deficit because they lack such an emotional driver when generating text and consequently may generate synthetic text which has affective incoherence i.e. lacking the kind of emotional coherence present in human-authored text. We subsequently develop an emotionally aware detector by fine-tuning a PLM on emotion. Experiment results indicate that our emotionally-aware detector achieves improvements across a range of synthetic text generators, various sized models, datasets, and domains. Finally, we compare our emotionally-aware synthetic text detector to ChatGPT in the task of identification of its own output and show substantial gains, reinforcing the potential of emotion as a signal to identify synthetic text. Code, models, and datasets are available at https: //github.com/alanagiasi/emoPLMsynth

The paper describes the RuSentNE-2023 evaluation devoted to targeted sentiment analysis in Russian news texts. The task is to predict sentiment towards a named entity in a single sentence. The dataset for RuSentNE-2023 evaluation is based on the Russian news corpus RuSentNE having rich sentiment-related annotation. The corpus is annotated with named entities and sentiments towards these entities, along with related effects and emotional states. The evaluation was organized using the CodaLab competition framework. The main evaluation measure was macro-averaged measure of positive and negative classes. The best results achieved were of 66% Macro F-measure (Positive+Negative classes). We also tested ChatGPT on the test set from our evaluation and found that the zero-shot answers provided by ChatGPT reached 60% of the F-measure, which corresponds to 4th place in the evaluation. ChatGPT also provided detailed explanations of its conclusion. This can be considered as quite high for zero-shot application.

The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which it is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category. One of our major contributions, through a dataset and a model, is to integrate the fact that an emotion can be expressed in different modes: from a direct mode, essentially lexicalized, to a more indirect mode, where emotions will only be suggested, a mode that NLP approaches generally don't take into account. Another originality is that the scope is on written texts, as opposed usual work focusing on conversational (often multi-modal) data. In this context, modes of expression are seen as a factor towards the automatic analysis of complexity in texts. Experiments on French texts show acceptable results compared to the human annotators' agreement, and outperforming results compared to using a large language model with in-context learning (i.e. no fine-tuning).

Large language models (LLMs) that produce human-like responses have begun to revolutionize research practices in the social sciences. We develop a novel methodological framework that fine-tunes LLMs with repeated cross-sectional surveys to incorporate the meaning of survey questions, individual beliefs, and temporal contexts for opinion prediction. We introduce two new emerging applications of the AI-augmented survey: retrodiction (i.e., predict year-level missing responses) and unasked opinion prediction (i.e., predict entirely missing responses). Among 3,110 binarized opinions from 68,846 Americans in the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2021, our models based on Alpaca-7b excel in retrodiction (AUC = 0.86 for personal opinion prediction, rho = 0.98 for public opinion prediction). These remarkable prediction capabilities allow us to fill in missing trends with high confidence and pinpoint when public attitudes changed, such as the rising support for same-sex marriage. On the other hand, our fine-tuned Alpaca-7b models show modest success in unasked opinion prediction (AUC = 0.73, rho = 0.67). We discuss practical constraints and ethical concerns regarding individual autonomy and privacy when using LLMs for opinion prediction. Our study demonstrates that LLMs and surveys can mutually enhance each other's capabilities: LLMs can broaden survey potential, while surveys can improve the alignment of LLMs.

With the release of ever more capable large language models (LLMs), researchers in NLP and related disciplines have started to explore the usability of LLMs for a wide variety of different annotation tasks. Very recently, a lot of this attention has shifted to tasks that are subjective in nature. Given that the latest generations of LLMs have digested and encoded extensive knowledge about different human subpopulations and individuals, the hope is that these models can be trained, tuned or prompted to align with a wide range of different human perspectives. While researchers already evaluate the success of this alignment via surveys and tests, there is a lack of resources to evaluate the alignment on what oftentimes matters the most in NLP; the actual downstream tasks. To fill this gap we present SubData, a Python library that offers researchers working on topics related to subjectivity in annotation tasks a convenient way of collecting, combining and using a range of suitable datasets.

Text in curve orientation, despite being one of the common text orientations in real world environment, has close to zero existence in well received scene text datasets such as ICDAR2013 and MSRA-TD500. The main motivation of Total-Text is to fill this gap and facilitate a new research direction for the scene text community. On top of the conventional horizontal and multi-oriented texts, it features curved-oriented text. Total-Text is highly diversified in orientations, more than half of its images have a combination of more than two orientations. Recently, a new breed of solutions that casted text detection as a segmentation problem has demonstrated their effectiveness against multi-oriented text. In order to evaluate its robustness against curved text, we fine-tuned DeconvNet and benchmark it on Total-Text. Total-Text with its annotation is available at https://github.com/cs-chan/Total-Text-Dataset

NLP tasks are often limited by scarcity of manually annotated data. In social media sentiment analysis and related tasks, researchers have therefore used binarized emoticons and specific hashtags as forms of distant supervision. Our paper shows that by extending the distant supervision to a more diverse set of noisy labels, the models can learn richer representations. Through emoji prediction on a dataset of 1246 million tweets containing one of 64 common emojis we obtain state-of-the-art performance on 8 benchmark datasets within sentiment, emotion and sarcasm detection using a single pretrained model. Our analyses confirm that the diversity of our emotional labels yield a performance improvement over previous distant supervision approaches.

Hate speech detection refers to the task of detecting hateful content that aims at denigrating an individual or a group based on their religion, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics. Due to the different policies of the platforms, different groups of people express hate in different ways. Furthermore, due to the lack of labeled data in some platforms it becomes challenging to build hate speech detection models. To this end, we revisit if we can learn a generalizable hate speech detection model for the cross platform setting, where we train the model on the data from one (source) platform and generalize the model across multiple (target) platforms. Existing generalization models rely on linguistic cues or auxiliary information, making them biased towards certain tags or certain kinds of words (e.g., abusive words) on the source platform and thus not applicable to the target platforms. Inspired by social and psychological theories, we endeavor to explore if there exist inherent causal cues that can be leveraged to learn generalizable representations for detecting hate speech across these distribution shifts. To this end, we propose a causality-guided framework, PEACE, that identifies and leverages two intrinsic causal cues omnipresent in hateful content: the overall sentiment and the aggression in the text. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple platforms (representing the distribution shift) showing if causal cues can help cross-platform generalization.

In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce and the model is expected to perform in the zero or few shot setting. Recently, several works have shown that continual pretraining or performing a second phase of pretraining (inter-training) which is better aligned with the downstream task, can lead to improved results, especially in the scarce data setting. Here, we propose to leverage sentiment-carrying discourse markers to generate large-scale weakly-labeled data, which in turn can be used to adapt language models for sentiment analysis. Extensive experimental results show the value of our approach on various benchmark datasets, including the finance domain. Code, models and data are available at https://github.com/ibm/tslm-discourse-markers.

This paper introduces HeBERT and HebEMO. HeBERT is a Transformer-based model for modern Hebrew text, which relies on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers) architecture. BERT has been shown to outperform alternative architectures in sentiment analysis, and is suggested to be particularly appropriate for MRLs. Analyzing multiple BERT specifications, we find that while model complexity correlates with high performance on language tasks that aim to understand terms in a sentence, a more-parsimonious model better captures the sentiment of entire sentence. Either way, out BERT-based language model outperforms all existing Hebrew alternatives on all common language tasks. HebEMO is a tool that uses HeBERT to detect polarity and extract emotions from Hebrew UGC. HebEMO is trained on a unique Covid-19-related UGC dataset that we collected and annotated for this study. Data collection and annotation followed an active learning procedure that aimed to maximize predictability. We show that HebEMO yields a high F1-score of 0.96 for polarity classification. Emotion detection reaches F1-scores of 0.78-0.97 for various target emotions, with the exception of surprise, which the model failed to capture (F1 = 0.41). These results are better than the best-reported performance, even among English-language models of emotion detection.

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.

High-quality preference datasets are essential for training reward models that can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) in generating high-quality responses aligned with human preferences. As LLMs become stronger and better aligned, permissively licensed preference datasets, such as Open Assistant, HH-RLHF, and HelpSteer need to be updated to remain effective for reward modeling. Methods that distil preference data from proprietary LLMs such as GPT-4 have restrictions on commercial usage imposed by model providers. To improve upon both generated responses and attribute labeling quality, we release HelpSteer2, a permissively licensed preference dataset (CC-BY-4.0). Using a powerful internal base model trained on HelpSteer2, we are able to achieve the SOTA score (92.0%) on Reward-Bench's primary dataset, outperforming currently listed open and proprietary models, as of June 12th, 2024. Notably, HelpSteer2 consists of only ten thousand response pairs, an order of magnitude fewer than existing preference datasets (e.g., HH-RLHF), which makes it highly efficient for training reward models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that reward models trained with HelpSteer2 are effective in aligning LLMs. In particular, we propose SteerLM 2.0, a model alignment approach that can effectively make use of the rich multi-attribute score predicted by our reward models. HelpSteer2 is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/HelpSteer2 and code is available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo-Aligner

We propose a novel attention mechanism, named Cog Attention, that enables attention weights to be negative for enhanced expressiveness, which stems from two key factors: (1) Cog Attention can shift the token deletion and copying function from a static OV matrix to dynamic QK inner products, with the OV matrix now focusing more on refinement or modification. The attention head can simultaneously delete, copy, or retain tokens by assigning them negative, positive, or minimal attention weights, respectively. As a result, a single attention head becomes more flexible and expressive. (2) Cog Attention improves the model's robustness against representational collapse, which can occur when earlier tokens are over-squashed into later positions, leading to homogeneous representations. Negative weights reduce effective information paths from earlier to later tokens, helping to mitigate this issue. We develop Transformer-like models which use Cog Attention as attention modules, including decoder-only models for language modeling and U-ViT diffusion models for image generation. Experiments show that models using Cog Attention exhibit superior performance compared to those employing traditional softmax attention modules. Our approach suggests a promising research direction for rethinking and breaking the entrenched constraints of traditional softmax attention, such as the requirement for non-negative weights.

Existing text scoring methods require a large corpus, struggle with short texts, or require hand-labeled data. We develop a text scoring framework that leverages generative large language models (LLMs) to (1) set texts against the backdrop of information from the near-totality of the web and digitized media, and (2) effectively transform pairwise text comparisons from a reasoning problem to a pattern recognition task. Our approach, concept-guided chain-of-thought (CGCoT), utilizes a chain of researcher-designed prompts with an LLM to generate a concept-specific breakdown for each text, akin to guidance provided to human coders. We then pairwise compare breakdowns using an LLM and aggregate answers into a score using a probability model. We apply this approach to better understand speech reflecting aversion to specific political parties on Twitter, a topic that has commanded increasing interest because of its potential contributions to democratic backsliding. We achieve stronger correlations with human judgments than widely used unsupervised text scoring methods like Wordfish. In a supervised setting, besides a small pilot dataset to develop CGCoT prompts, our measures require no additional hand-labeled data and produce predictions on par with RoBERTa-Large fine-tuned on thousands of hand-labeled tweets. This project showcases the potential of combining human expertise and LLMs for scoring tasks.

To demystify the "black box" property of deep neural networks for natural language processing (NLP), several methods have been proposed to interpret their predictions by measuring the change in prediction probability after erasing each token of an input. Since existing methods replace each token with a predefined value (i.e., zero), the resulting sentence lies out of the training data distribution, yielding misleading interpretations. In this study, we raise the out-of-distribution problem induced by the existing interpretation methods and present a remedy; we propose to marginalize each token out. We interpret various NLP models trained for sentiment analysis and natural language inference using the proposed method.

There is an emerging consensus that we need to align AI systems with human values (Gabriel, 2020; Ji et al., 2024), but it remains unclear how to apply this to language models in practice. We split the problem of "aligning to human values" into three parts: first, eliciting values from people; second, reconciling those values into an alignment target for training ML models; and third, actually training the model. In this paper, we focus on the first two parts, and ask the question: what are "good" ways to synthesize diverse human inputs about values into a target for aligning language models? To answer this question, we first define a set of 6 criteria that we believe must be satisfied for an alignment target to shape model behavior in accordance with human values. We then propose a process for eliciting and reconciling values called Moral Graph Elicitation (MGE), which uses a large language model to interview participants about their values in particular contexts; our approach is inspired by the philosophy of values advanced by Taylor (1977), Chang (2004), and others. We trial MGE with a representative sample of 500 Americans, on 3 intentionally divisive prompts (e.g. advice about abortion). Our results demonstrate that MGE is promising for improving model alignment across all 6 criteria. For example, almost all participants (89.1%) felt well represented by the process, and (89%) thought the final moral graph was fair, even if their value wasn't voted as the wisest. Our process often results in "expert" values (e.g. values from women who have solicited abortion advice) rising to the top of the moral graph, without defining who is considered an expert in advance.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a task that enables machines to understand human language. Some tasks, such as stance detection and sentiment analysis, are closely related to individual subjective perspectives, thus termed individual-level NLU. Previously, these tasks are often simplified to text-level NLU tasks, ignoring individual factors. This not only makes inference difficult and unexplainable but often results in a large number of label errors when creating datasets. To address the above limitations, we propose a new NLU annotation guideline based on individual-level factors. Specifically, we incorporate other posts by the same individual and then annotate individual subjective perspectives after considering all individual posts. We use this guideline to expand and re-annotate the stance detection and topic-based sentiment analysis datasets. We find that error rates in the samples were as high as 31.7\% and 23.3\%. We further use large language models to conduct experiments on the re-annotation datasets and find that the large language models perform well on both datasets after adding individual factors. Both GPT-4o and Llama3-70B can achieve an accuracy greater than 87\% on the re-annotation datasets. We also verify the effectiveness of individual factors through ablation studies. We call on future researchers to add individual factors when creating such datasets. Our re-annotation dataset can be found at https://github.com/24yearsoldstudent/Individual-NLU

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential to align them with human values and intentions. This process often utilizes methods like pairwise comparisons and KL divergence against a reference LLM, focusing on the evaluation of full answers generated by the models. However, the generation of these responses occurs in a token level, following a sequential, auto-regressive fashion. In this paper, we introduce Token-level Direct Preference Optimization (TDPO), a novel approach to align LLMs with human preferences by optimizing policy at the token level. Unlike previous methods, which face challenges in divergence efficiency, TDPO incorporates forward KL divergence constraints for each token, improving alignment and diversity. Utilizing the Bradley-Terry model for a token-based reward system, TDPO enhances the regulation of KL divergence, while preserving simplicity without the need for explicit reward modeling. Experimental results across various text tasks demonstrate TDPO's superior performance in balancing alignment with generation diversity. Notably, fine-tuning with TDPO strikes a better balance than DPO in the controlled sentiment generation and single-turn dialogue datasets, and significantly improves the quality of generated responses compared to both DPO and PPO-based RLHF methods. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Vance0124/Token-level-Direct-Preference-Optimization.

In this paper we present the RuSentRel corpus including analytical texts in the sphere of international relations. For each document we annotated sentiments from the author to mentioned named entities, and sentiments of relations between mentioned entities. In the current experiments, we considered the problem of extracting sentiment relations between entities for the whole documents as a three-class machine learning task. We experimented with conventional machine-learning methods (Naive Bayes, SVM, Random Forest).

Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.74 macro F1 vs. 79.29 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.52 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.77) at much less cost (0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.

Morality is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and ethics, influencing how we interact with each other and the world around us. When faced with a moral dilemma, a person's ability to make clear moral judgments can be clouded. Due to many factors such as personal biases, emotions and situational factors people can find it difficult to decide their best course of action. The AmITheAsshole (AITA) subreddit is a forum on the social media platform Reddit that helps people get clarity and objectivity on their predicaments. In the forum people post anecdotes about moral dilemmas they are facing in their lives, seeking validation for their actions or advice on how to navigate the situation from the community. The morality of the actions in each post is classified based on the collective opinion of the community into mainly two labels, "Not The Asshole" (NTA) and "You Are The Asshole" (YTA). This project aims to generate comments with moral reasoning for stories with moral dilemmas using the AITA subreddit as a dataset. While past literature has explored the classification of posts into labels (Alhassan et al., 2022), the generation of comments remains a novel and challenging task. It involves understanding the complex social and ethical considerations in each situation. To address this challenge, we will leverage the vast amount of data on the forum with the goal of generating coherent comments that align with the norms and values of the AITA community. In this endeavor, we aim to evaluate state-of-the-art seq2seq text generation models for their ability to make moral judgments similarly to humans, ultimately producing concise comments providing clear moral stances and advice for the poster.

A positive phrase or a sentence with an underlying negative motive is usually defined as sarcasm that is widely used in today's social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. In recent times active users in social media platforms are increasing dramatically which raises the need for an automated NLP-based system that can be utilized in various tasks such as determining market demand, sentiment analysis, threat detection, etc. However, since sarcasm usually implies the opposite meaning and its detection is frequently a challenging issue, data meaning extraction through an NLP-based model becomes more complicated. As a result, there has been a lot of study on sarcasm detection in English over the past several years, and there's been a noticeable improvement and yet sarcasm detection in the Bangla language's state remains the same. In this article, we present a BERT-based system that can achieve 99.60\% while the utilized traditional machine learning algorithms are only capable of achieving 89.93\%. Additionally, we have employed Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations that introduce explainability to our system. Moreover, we have utilized a newly collected bangla sarcasm dataset, BanglaSarc that was constructed specifically for the evaluation of this study. This dataset consists of fresh records of sarcastic and non-sarcastic comments, the majority of which are acquired from Facebook and YouTube comment sections.

Zero-shot text classification (0Shot-TC) is a challenging NLU problem to which little attention has been paid by the research community. 0Shot-TC aims to associate an appropriate label with a piece of text, irrespective of the text domain and the aspect (e.g., topic, emotion, event, etc.) described by the label. And there are only a few articles studying 0Shot-TC, all focusing only on topical categorization which, we argue, is just the tip of the iceberg in 0Shot-TC. In addition, the chaotic experiments in literature make no uniform comparison, which blurs the progress. This work benchmarks the 0Shot-TC problem by providing unified datasets, standardized evaluations, and state-of-the-art baselines. Our contributions include: i) The datasets we provide facilitate studying 0Shot-TC relative to conceptually different and diverse aspects: the ``topic'' aspect includes ``sports'' and ``politics'' as labels; the ``emotion'' aspect includes ``joy'' and ``anger''; the ``situation'' aspect includes ``medical assistance'' and ``water shortage''. ii) We extend the existing evaluation setup (label-partially-unseen) -- given a dataset, train on some labels, test on all labels -- to include a more challenging yet realistic evaluation label-fully-unseen 0Shot-TC (Chang et al., 2008), aiming at classifying text snippets without seeing task specific training data at all. iii) We unify the 0Shot-TC of diverse aspects within a textual entailment formulation and study it this way. Code & Data: https://github.com/yinwenpeng/BenchmarkingZeroShot

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.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) are key research topics for computers to understand human behaviors. From a psychological perspective, emotions are the expression of affect or feelings during a short period, while sentiments are formed and held for a longer period. However, most existing works study sentiment and emotion separately and do not fully exploit the complementary knowledge behind the two. In this paper, we propose a multimodal sentiment knowledge-sharing framework (UniMSE) that unifies MSA and ERC tasks from features, labels, and models. We perform modality fusion at the syntactic and semantic levels and introduce contrastive learning between modalities and samples to better capture the difference and consistency between sentiments and emotions. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets, MOSI, MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve consistent improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Even for us, it can be challenging to comprehend the meaning of songs. As part of this project, we explore the process of generating the meaning of songs. Despite the widespread use of text-to-text models, few attempts have been made to achieve a similar objective. Songs are primarily studied in the context of sentiment analysis. This involves identifying opinions and emotions in texts, evaluating them as positive or negative, and utilizing these evaluations to make music recommendations. In this paper, we present a generative model that offers implicit meanings for several lines of a song. Our model uses a decoder Transformer architecture GPT-2, where the input is the lyrics of a song. Furthermore, we compared the performance of this architecture with that of the encoder-decoder Transformer architecture of the T5 model. We also examined the effect of different prompt types with the option of appending additional information, such as the name of the artist and the title of the song. Moreover, we tested different decoding methods with different training parameters and evaluated our results using ROUGE. In order to build our dataset, we utilized the 'Genious' API, which allowed us to acquire the lyrics of songs and their explanations, as well as their rich metadata.

Multi-aspect controllable text generation is a more challenging and practical task than single-aspect control. Existing methods achieve complex multi-aspect control by fusing multiple controllers learned from single-aspect, but suffer from attribute degeneration caused by the mutual interference of these controllers. To address this, we provide observations on attribute fusion from a distributional perspective and propose to directly search for the intersection areas of multiple attribute distributions as their combination for generation. Our method first estimates the attribute space with an autoencoder structure. Afterward, we iteratively approach the intersections by jointly minimizing distances to points representing different attributes. Finally, we map them to attribute-relevant sentences with a prefix-tuning-based decoder. Experiments on the three-aspect control task, including sentiment, topic, and detoxification aspects, reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis also supplies some explanatory support for the effectiveness of our approach.

Sequential recommendation systems aim to provide personalized recommendations for users based on their interaction history. To achieve this, they often incorporate auxiliary information, such as textual descriptions of items and auxiliary tasks, like predicting user preferences and intent. Despite numerous efforts to enhance these models, they still suffer from limited personalization. To address this issue, we propose a new paradigm, which we term preference discerning. In preference dscerning, we explicitly condition a generative sequential recommendation system on user preferences within its context. To this end, we generate user preferences using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on user reviews and item-specific data. To evaluate preference discerning capabilities of sequential recommendation systems, we introduce a novel benchmark that provides a holistic evaluation across various scenarios, including preference steering and sentiment following. We assess current state-of-the-art methods using our benchmark and show that they struggle to accurately discern user preferences. Therefore, we propose a new method named Mender (Multimodal Preference discerner), which improves upon existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark. Our results show that Mender can be effectively guided by human preferences even though they have not been observed during training, paving the way toward more personalized sequential recommendation systems. We will open-source the code and benchmarks upon publication.

Emotional support is a crucial skill for many real-world scenarios, including caring for the elderly, mental health support, and customer service chats. This paper presents a novel task of empathetic dialog generation with positive emotion elicitation to promote users' positive emotions, similar to that of emotional support between humans. In this task, the agent conducts empathetic responses along with the target of eliciting the user's positive emotions in the multi-turn dialog. To facilitate the study of this task, we collect a large-scale emotional dialog dataset with positive emotion elicitation, called PosEmoDial (about 820k dialogs, 3M utterances). In these dialogs, the agent tries to guide the user from any possible initial emotional state, e.g., sadness, to a positive emotional state. Then we present a positive-emotion-guided dialog generation model with a novel loss function design. This loss function encourages the dialog model to not only elicit positive emotions from users but also ensure smooth emotional transitions along with the whole dialog. Finally, we establish benchmark results on PosEmoDial, and we will release this dataset and related source code to facilitate future studies.

Human communication is inherently multimodal and asynchronous. Analyzing human emotions and sentiment is an emerging field of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing an increasing amount of multimodal content in local languages on social media about products and other topics. However, there are not many multimodal resources available for under-resourced Dravidian languages. Our study aims to create a multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for the under-resourced Tamil and Malayalam languages. First, we downloaded product or movies review videos from YouTube for Tamil and Malayalam. Next, we created captions for the videos with the help of annotators. Then we labelled the videos for sentiment, and verified the inter-annotator agreement using Fleiss's Kappa. This is the first multimodal sentiment analysis dataset for Tamil and Malayalam by volunteer annotators.