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Jul 15

SEntFiN 1.0: Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Financial News

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

  • 4 authors
·
May 20, 2023

DESS: DeBERTa Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Fine-grained sentiment analysis faces ongoing challenges in Aspect Sentiment Triple Extraction (ASTE), particularly in accurately capturing the relationships between aspects, opinions, and sentiment polarities. While researchers have made progress using BERT and Graph Neural Networks, the full potential of advanced language models in understanding complex language patterns remains unexplored. We introduce DESS, a new approach that builds upon previous work by integrating DeBERTa's enhanced attention mechanism to better understand context and relationships in text. Our framework maintains a dual-channel structure, where DeBERTa works alongside an LSTM channel to process both meaning and grammatical patterns in text. We have carefully refined how these components work together, paying special attention to how different types of language information interact. When we tested DESS on standard datasets, it showed meaningful improvements over current methods, with F1-score increases of 4.85, 8.36, and 2.42 in identifying aspect opinion pairs and determining sentiment accurately. Looking deeper into the results, we found that DeBERTa's sophisticated attention system helps DESS handle complicated sentence structures better, especially when important words are far apart. Our findings suggest that upgrading to more advanced language models when thoughtfully integrated, can lead to real improvements in how well we can analyze sentiments in text. The implementation of our approach is publicly available at: https://github.com/VishalRepos/DESS.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025

PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

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/

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 18, 2024

Knowing What, How and Why: A Near Complete Solution for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

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.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 4, 2019

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

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

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 8, 2023

Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning for Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) identifies individuals' sentiment states in videos by integrating visual, audio, and text modalities. Despite progress in existing methods, the inherent modality heterogeneity limits the effective capture of interactive sentiment features across modalities. In this paper, by introducing a Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning (MMCL) framework, we facilitate cross-modal interactions and capture enhanced and complementary features from modality-common and modality-specific representations, respectively. Specifically, we design a parameter-free decoupling module and separate uni-modality into modality-common and modality-specific components through semantics assessment of cross-modal elements. For modality-specific representations, inspired by the act-reward mechanism in reinforcement learning, we design policy models to adaptively mine complementary sentiment features under the guidance of a joint reward. For modality-common representations, intra-modal attention is employed to highlight crucial components, playing enhanced roles among modalities. Experimental results, including superiority evaluations on four databases, effectiveness verification of each module, and assessment of complementary features, demonstrate that MMCL successfully learns collaborative features across modalities and significantly improves performance. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/MMCL.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025

Classifying YouTube Comments Based on Sentiment and Type of Sentence

As a YouTube channel grows, each video can potentially collect enormous amounts of comments that provide direct feedback from the viewers. These comments are a major means of understanding viewer expectations and improving channel engagement. However, the comments only represent a general collection of user opinions about the channel and the content. Many comments are poorly constructed, trivial, and have improper spellings and grammatical errors. As a result, it is a tedious job to identify the comments that best interest the content creators. In this paper, we extract and classify the raw comments into different categories based on both sentiment and sentence types that will help YouTubers find relevant comments for growing their viewership. Existing studies have focused either on sentiment analysis (positive and negative) or classification of sub-types within the same sentence types (e.g., types of questions) on a text corpus. These have limited application on non-traditional text corpus like YouTube comments. We address this challenge of text extraction and classification from YouTube comments using well-known statistical measures and machine learning models. We evaluate each combination of statistical measure and the machine learning model using cross validation and F_1 scores. The results show that our approach that incorporates conventional methods performs well on the classification task, validating its potential in assisting content creators increase viewer engagement on their channel.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 30, 2021

Thesis: Document Summarization with applications to Keyword extraction and Image Retrieval

Automatic summarization is the process of reducing a text document in order to generate a summary that retains the most important points of the original document. In this work, we study two problems - i) summarizing a text document as set of keywords/caption, for image recommedation, ii) generating opinion summary which good mix of relevancy and sentiment with the text document. Intially, we present our work on an recommending images for enhancing a substantial amount of existing plain text news articles. We use probabilistic models and word similarity heuristics to generate captions and extract Key-phrases which are re-ranked using a rank aggregation framework with relevance feedback mechanism. We show that such rank aggregation and relevant feedback which are typically used in Tagging Documents, Text Information Retrieval also helps in improving image retrieval. These queries are fed to the Yahoo Search Engine to obtain relevant images 1. Our proposed method is observed to perform better than all existing baselines. Additonally, We propose a set of submodular functions for opinion summarization. Opinion summarization has built in it the tasks of summarization and sentiment detection. However, it is not easy to detect sentiment and simultaneously extract summary. The two tasks conflict in the sense that the demand of compression may drop sentiment bearing sentences, and the demand of sentiment detection may bring in redundant sentences. However, using submodularity we show how to strike a balance between the two requirements. Our functions generate summaries such that there is good correlation between document sentiment and summary sentiment along with good ROUGE score. We also compare the performances of the proposed submodular functions.

  • 1 authors
·
May 20, 2024

Instruct-DeBERTa: A Hybrid Approach for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis on Textual Reviews

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that focuses on extracting sentiments related to specific aspects within a text, offering deep insights into customer opinions. Traditional sentiment analysis methods, while useful for determining overall sentiment, often miss the implicit opinions about particular product or service features. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the evolution of ABSA methodologies, from lexicon-based approaches to machine learning and deep learning techniques. We emphasize the recent advancements in Transformer-based models, particularly Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and its variants, which have set new benchmarks in ABSA tasks. We focused on finetuning Llama and Mistral models, building hybrid models using the SetFit framework, and developing our own model by exploiting the strengths of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based models for aspect term extraction (ATE) and aspect sentiment classification (ASC). Our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa uses SOTA InstructABSA for aspect extraction and DeBERTa-V3-baseabsa-V1 for aspect sentiment classification. We utilize datasets from different domains to evaluate our model's performance. Our experiments indicate that the proposed hybrid model significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of sentiment analysis across all experimented domains. As per our findings, our hybrid model Instruct - DeBERTa is the best-performing model for the joint task of ATE and ASC for both SemEval restaurant 2014 and SemEval laptop 2014 datasets separately. By addressing the limitations of existing methodologies, our approach provides a robust solution for understanding detailed consumer feedback, thus offering valuable insights for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction and product development.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 22, 2024

Leveraging Large Language Models for Mobile App Review Feature Extraction

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this method improves the precision and recall of extracted features and enhances performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 2, 2024

Developing a Comprehensive Framework for Sentiment Analysis in Turkish

In this thesis, we developed a comprehensive framework for sentiment analysis that takes its many aspects into account mainly for Turkish. We have also proposed several approaches specific to sentiment analysis in English only. We have accordingly made five major and three minor contributions. We generated a novel and effective feature set by combining unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised metrics. We then fed them as input into classical machine learning methods, and outperformed neural network models for datasets of different genres in both Turkish and English. We created a polarity lexicon with a semi-supervised domain-specific method, which has been the first approach applied for corpora in Turkish. We performed a fine morphological analysis for the sentiment classification task in Turkish by determining the polarities of morphemes. This can be adapted to other morphologically-rich or agglutinative languages as well. We have built a novel neural network architecture, which combines recurrent and recursive neural network models for English. We built novel word embeddings that exploit sentiment, syntactic, semantic, and lexical characteristics for both Turkish and English. We also redefined context windows as subclauses in modelling word representations in English. This can also be applied to other linguistic fields and natural language processing tasks. We have achieved state-of-the-art and significant results for all these original approaches. Our minor contributions include methods related to aspect-based sentiment in Turkish, parameter redefinition in the semi-supervised approach, and aspect term extraction techniques for English. This thesis can be considered the most detailed and comprehensive study made on sentiment analysis in Turkish as of July, 2020. Our work has also contributed to the opinion classification problem in English.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 29, 2025

Unveiling User Perceptions in the Generative AI Era: A Sentiment-Driven Evaluation of AI Educational Apps' Role in Digital Transformation of e-Teaching

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into education has driven digital transformation in e-teaching, yet user perceptions of AI educational apps remain underexplored. This study performs a sentiment-driven evaluation of user reviews from top AI ed-apps on the Google Play Store to assess efficacy, challenges, and pedagogical implications. Our pipeline involved scraping app data and reviews, RoBERTa for binary sentiment classification, GPT-4o for key point extraction, and GPT-5 for synthesizing top positive/negative themes. Apps were categorized into seven types (e.g., homework helpers, math solvers, language tools), with overlaps reflecting multifunctional designs. Results indicate predominantly positive sentiments, with homework apps like Edu AI (95.9% positive) and Answer.AI (92.7%) leading in accuracy, speed, and personalization, while language/LMS apps (e.g., Teacher AI at 21.8% positive) lag due to instability and limited features. Positives emphasize efficiency in brainstorming, problem-solving, and engagement; negatives center on paywalls, inaccuracies, ads, and glitches. Trends show that homework helpers outperform specialized tools, highlighting AI's democratizing potential amid risks of dependency and inequity. The discussion proposes future ecosystems with hybrid AI-human models, VR/AR for immersive learning, and a roadmap for developers (adaptive personalization) and policymakers (monetization regulation for inclusivity). This underscores generative AI's role in advancing e-teaching by enabling ethical refinements that foster equitable, innovative environments. The full dataset is available here(https://github.com/erfan-nourbakhsh/GenAI-EdSent).

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 12, 2025 1

Data-Efficient Adaptation and a Novel Evaluation Method for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained opinion mining approach that identifies and classifies opinions associated with specific entities (aspects) or their categories within a sentence. Despite its rapid growth and broad potential, ABSA research and resources remain concentrated in commercial domains, leaving analytical needs unmet in high-demand yet low-resource areas such as education and healthcare. Domain adaptation challenges and most existing methods' reliance on resource-intensive in-training knowledge injection further hinder progress in these areas. Moreover, traditional evaluation methods based on exact matches are overly rigid for ABSA tasks, penalising any boundary variations which may misrepresent the performance of generative models. This work addresses these gaps through three contributions: 1) We propose a novel evaluation method, Flexible Text Similarity Matching and Optimal Bipartite Pairing (FTS-OBP), which accommodates realistic extraction boundary variations while maintaining strong correlation with traditional metrics and offering fine-grained diagnostics. 2) We present the first ABSA study of small decoder-only generative language models (SLMs; <7B parameters), examining resource lower bounds via a case study in education review ABSA. We systematically explore data-free (in-context learning and weight merging) and data-light fine-tuning methods, and propose a multitask fine-tuning strategy that significantly enhances SLM performance, enabling 1.5-3.8 B models to surpass proprietary large models and approach benchmark results with only 200-1,000 examples on a single GPU. 3) We release the first public set of education review ABSA resources to support future research in low-resource domains.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025 1

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

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

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

EduRABSA: An Education Review Dataset for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Tasks

Every year, most educational institutions seek and receive an enormous volume of text feedback from students on courses, teaching, and overall experience. Yet, turning this raw feedback into useful insights is far from straightforward. It has been a long-standing challenge to adopt automatic opinion mining solutions for such education review text data due to the content complexity and low-granularity reporting requirements. Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) offers a promising solution with its rich, sub-sentence-level opinion mining capabilities. However, existing ABSA research and resources are very heavily focused on the commercial domain. In education, they are scarce and hard to develop due to limited public datasets and strict data protection. A high-quality, annotated dataset is urgently needed to advance research in this under-resourced area. In this work, we present EduRABSA (Education Review ABSA), the first public, annotated ABSA education review dataset that covers three review subject types (course, teaching staff, university) in the English language and all main ABSA tasks, including the under-explored implicit aspect and implicit opinion extraction. We also share ASQE-DPT (Data Processing Tool), an offline, lightweight, installation-free manual data annotation tool that generates labelled datasets for comprehensive ABSA tasks from a single-task annotation. Together, these resources contribute to the ABSA community and education domain by removing the dataset barrier, supporting research transparency and reproducibility, and enabling the creation and sharing of further resources. The dataset, annotation tool, and scripts and statistics for dataset processing and sampling are available at https://github.com/yhua219/edurabsa_dataset_and_annotation_tool.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 23, 2025 2

CN-Buzz2Portfolio: A Chinese-Market Dataset and Benchmark for LLM-Based Macro and Sector Asset Allocation from Daily Trending Financial News

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from static Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment analysis and event extraction to acting as dynamic decision-making agents in complex financial environments. However, the evolution of LLMs into autonomous financial agents faces a significant dilemma in evaluation paradigms. Direct live trading is irreproducible and prone to outcome bias by confounding luck with skill, whereas existing static benchmarks are often confined to entity-level stock picking and ignore broader market attention. To facilitate the rigorous analysis of these challenges, we introduce CN-Buzz2Portfolio, a reproducible benchmark grounded in the Chinese market that maps daily trending news to macro and sector asset allocation. Spanning a rolling horizon from 2024 to mid-2025, our dataset simulates a realistic public attention stream, requiring agents to distill investment logic from high-exposure narratives instead of pre-filtered entity news. We propose a Tri-Stage CPA Agent Workflow involving Compression, Perception, and Allocation to evaluate LLMs on broad asset classes such as Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) rather than individual stocks, thereby reducing idiosyncratic volatility. Extensive experiments on nine LLMs reveal significant disparities in how models translate macro-level narratives into portfolio weights. This work provides new insights into the alignment between general reasoning and financial decision-making, and all data, codes, and experiments are released to promote sustainable financial agent research.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 17

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

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

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 9, 2022

The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering

Deep learning has improved performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks individually. However, general NLP models cannot emerge within a paradigm that focuses on the particularities of a single metric, dataset, and task. We introduce the Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP), a challenge that spans ten tasks: question answering, machine translation, summarization, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, semantic role labeling, zero-shot relation extraction, goal-oriented dialogue, semantic parsing, and commonsense pronoun resolution. We cast all tasks as question answering over a context. Furthermore, we present a new Multitask Question Answering Network (MQAN) jointly learns all tasks in decaNLP without any task-specific modules or parameters in the multitask setting. MQAN shows improvements in transfer learning for machine translation and named entity recognition, domain adaptation for sentiment analysis and natural language inference, and zero-shot capabilities for text classification. We demonstrate that the MQAN's multi-pointer-generator decoder is key to this success and performance further improves with an anti-curriculum training strategy. Though designed for decaNLP, MQAN also achieves state of the art results on the WikiSQL semantic parsing task in the single-task setting. We also release code for procuring and processing data, training and evaluating models, and reproducing all experiments for decaNLP.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 20, 2018

Spider 2.0-AIFunc: Extending Real-World Text-to-SQL to AI-Native SQL Workflows

Major cloud data platforms now expose large language model capabilities as native SQL functions, enabling analysts to perform classification, filtering, sentiment analysis, extraction, similarity search, and aggregation within ordinary SQL queries. Yet existing text-to-SQL benchmarks evaluate only conventional SQL and provide no signal on whether models can generate such AI-native SQL. We introduce Spider 2.0-AIFunc, a benchmark of 465 verified instances across 125 real-world databases covering six types of AI functions on the Snowflake platform. Starting from an existing enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark, we construct Spider 2.0-AIFunc through an agent-based pipeline that rewrites source tasks into AI-native form, simultaneously transforming target queries and refining natural language instructions to make the intended AI-native solution explicit and reduce ambiguity. All instances pass a multi-round repeated execution protocol across temporally separated windows to confirm result stability before release. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art language models, we find that the strongest proprietary models reach 67-70% execution accuracy while the best open-source model achieves 58.1%, a gap driven primarily by errors in predicate specification, schema grounding, and AI function parameterization. Agent frameworks designed for traditional text-to-SQL challenges, such as schema retrieval and relevant table selection, do not transfer effectively to AI-native SQL: a minimal agent setup consistently matches or outperforms more elaborate alternatives, suggesting that the strategies these frameworks employ are less critical in this setting. Data are available at https://github.com/Leolty/Spider2-AIFunc .

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 6

Large Language Models as Counterfactual Generator: Strengths and Weaknesses

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a range of natural language understanding and generation tasks. Yet, their ability to generate counterfactuals, which can be used for areas like data augmentation, remains under-explored. This study aims to investigate the counterfactual generation capabilities of LLMs and analysis factors that influence this ability. First, we evaluate how effective are LLMs in counterfactual generation through data augmentation experiments for small language models (SLMs) across four tasks: sentiment analysis, natural language inference, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. While LLMs show promising enhancements in various settings, they struggle in complex tasks due to their self-limitations and the lack of logical guidance to produce counterfactuals that align with commonsense. Second, our analysis reveals the pivotal role of providing accurate task definitions and detailed step-by-step instructions to LLMs in generating counterfactuals. Interestingly, we also find that LLMs can generate reasonable counterfactuals even with unreasonable demonstrations, which illustrates that demonstrations are primarily to regulate the output format.This study provides the first comprehensive insight into counterfactual generation abilities of LLMs, and offers a novel perspective on utilizing LLMs for data augmentation to enhance SLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
May 24, 2023

Multi-source Heterogeneous Public Opinion Analysis via Collaborative Reasoning and Adaptive Fusion: A Systematically Integrated Approach

The analysis of public opinion from multiple heterogeneous sources presents significant challenges due to structural differences, semantic variations, and platform-specific biases. This paper introduces a novel Collaborative Reasoning and Adaptive Fusion (CRAF) framework that systematically integrates traditional feature-based methods with large language models (LLMs) through a structured multi-stage reasoning mechanism. Our approach features four key innovations: (1) a cross-platform collaborative attention module that aligns semantic representations while preserving source-specific characteristics, (2) a hierarchical adaptive fusion mechanism that dynamically weights features based on both data quality and task requirements, (3) a joint optimization strategy that simultaneously learns topic representations and sentiment distributions through shared latent spaces, and (4) a novel multimodal extraction capability that processes video content from platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou by integrating OCR, ASR, and visual sentiment analysis. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that CRAF achieves a tighter generalization bound with a reduction of O(sqrt(d log K / m)) compared to independent source modeling, where d is feature dimensionality, K is the number of sources, and m is sample size. Comprehensive experiments on three multi-platform datasets (Weibo-12, CrossPlatform-15, NewsForum-8) show that CRAF achieves an average topic clustering ARI of 0.76 (4.1% improvement over best baseline) and sentiment analysis F1-score of 0.84 (3.8% improvement). The framework exhibits strong cross-platform adaptability, reducing the labeled data requirement for new platforms by 75%.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 24

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

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

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 4, 2021

Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded on-line renders automated understanding of lengthy texts a critical issue. Relevant applications include automated Web mining, legal document review, medical records analysis, financial reports analysis, contract management, environmental impact assessment, news aggregation, etc. Despite the relatively recent development of efficient algorithms for analyzing long documents, practical tools in this field are currently flourishing. This article serves as an entry point into this dynamic domain and aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of the relevant neural building blocks, serving as a concise tutorial for the field. Secondly, it offers a brief examination of the current state-of-the-art in long document NLP, with a primary focus on two key tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Consequently, this article presents an introductory exploration of document-level analysis, addressing the primary challenges, concerns, and existing solutions. Finally, the article presents publicly available annotated datasets that can facilitate further research in this area.

  • 4 authors
·
May 25, 2023

SentiPers: A Sentiment Analysis Corpus for Persian

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 23, 2018

UniSent: Universal Adaptable Sentiment Lexica for 1000+ Languages

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

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 21, 2019

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 13, 2016

SalAngaBhava: A Sinhala Market Dataset for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis has been a primary domain under Natural Language Processing (NLP) from its inception as it plays a vital role in both real-world and research applications. In high-resource languages, this has been extended a step further, and instead of predicting sentiment at the sentence level, models have been developed to detect more fine-grained sentiments at aspect level. However, in order to conduct this fine-grained Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), datasets annotated with aspects and sentiments toward the said aspects is required. Such datasets are lacking for low-resources languages among which, we can count Sinhala, an Indo-Aryan languages used primarily in Sri Lanka. In this work, we introduce, SalAngaBhava, a new Sinhala Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis dataset which contains Sinhala product reviews that are manually labeled with aspect terms and the associated sentiments (positive, negative, neutral). The data was collected from domain-relevant sources such as user-generated reviews and comments, and was annotated following carefully defined guidelines to ensure consistency and quality. The dataset consists of sentences and aspect-sentiment pairs, encompassing a considerable range of aspects from several domains. The analysis confirms that the dataset is well-structured and sufficiently balanced for ABSA research. This dataset can be used as a benchmark and facilitates further studies related to Sinhala natural language processing, and low-resource sentiment analysis tasks.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 5

The ParlaSent multilingual training dataset for sentiment identification in parliamentary proceedings

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

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 18, 2023

SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

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

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 27, 2023

A Systematic Review of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis: Domains, Methods, and Trends

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained type of sentiment analysis that identifies aspects and their associated opinions from a given text. With the surge of digital opinionated text data, ABSA gained increasing popularity for its ability to mine more detailed and targeted insights. Many review papers on ABSA subtasks and solution methodologies exist, however, few focus on trends over time or systemic issues relating to research application domains, datasets, and solution approaches. To fill the gap, this paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of ABSA studies with a focus on trends and high-level relationships among these fundamental components. This review is one of the largest SLRs on ABSA. To our knowledge, it is also the first to systematically examine the interrelations among ABSA research and data distribution across domains, as well as trends in solution paradigms and approaches. Our sample includes 727 primary studies screened from 8550 search results without time constraints via an innovative automatic filtering process. Our quantitative analysis not only identifies trends in nearly two decades of ABSA research development but also unveils a systemic lack of dataset and domain diversity as well as domain mismatch that may hinder the development of future ABSA research. We discuss these findings and their implications and propose suggestions for future research.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 16, 2023

Good Debt or Bad Debt: Detecting Semantic Orientations in Economic Texts

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 19, 2013

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

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

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 11, 2020