Analyst Reports and Stock Performance: Evidence from the Chinese Market

This article applies natural language processing (NLP) to extract and quantify textual information to predict stock performance. Using an extensive dataset of Chinese analyst reports and employing a customized BERT deep learning model for Chinese text, this study categorizes the sentiment of the reports as positive, neutral, or negative. The findings underscore the predictive capacity of this sentiment indicator for stock volatility, excess returns, and trading volume. Specifically, analyst reports with strong positive sentiment will increase excess return and intraday volatility, and vice versa, reports with strong negative sentiment also increase volatility and trading volume, but decrease future excess return. The magnitude of this effect is greater for positive sentiment reports than for negative sentiment reports. This article contributes to the empirical literature on sentiment analysis and the response of the stock market to news in the Chinese stock market.

GPTKB: Building Very Large Knowledge Bases from Language Models

General-domain knowledge bases (KB), in particular the "big three" -- Wikidata, Yago and DBpedia -- are the backbone of many intelligent applications. While these three have seen steady development, comprehensive KB construction at large has seen few fresh attempts. In this work, we propose to build a large general-domain KB entirely from a large language model (LLM). We demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale KB construction from LLMs, while highlighting specific challenges arising around entity recognition, entity and property canonicalization, and taxonomy construction. As a prototype, we use GPT-4o-mini to construct GPTKB, which contains 105 million triples for more than 2.9 million entities, at a cost 100x less than previous KBC projects. Our work is a landmark for two fields: For NLP, for the first time, it provides \textit{constructive} insights into the knowledge (or beliefs) of LLMs. For the Semantic Web, it shows novel ways forward for the long-standing challenge of general-domain KB construction. GPTKB is accessible at https://gptkb.org.

InstructAV: Instruction Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Authorship Verification

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in a wide range of NLP tasks. However, when it comes to authorship verification (AV) tasks, which involve determining whether two given texts share the same authorship, even advanced models like ChatGPT exhibit notable limitations. This paper introduces a novel approach, termed InstructAV, for authorship verification. This approach utilizes LLMs in conjunction with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method to simultaneously improve accuracy and explainability. The distinctiveness of InstructAV lies in its ability to align classification decisions with transparent and understandable explanations, representing a significant progression in the field of authorship verification. Through comprehensive experiments conducted across various datasets, InstructAV demonstrates its state-of-the-art performance on the AV task, offering high classification accuracy coupled with enhanced explanation reliability.

ToxiCloakCN: Evaluating Robustness of Offensive Language Detection in Chinese with Cloaking Perturbations

Detecting hate speech and offensive language is essential for maintaining a safe and respectful digital environment. This study examines the limitations of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in identifying offensive content within systematically perturbed data, with a focus on Chinese, a language particularly susceptible to such perturbations. We introduce \textsf{ToxiCloakCN}, an enhanced dataset derived from ToxiCN, augmented with homophonic substitutions and emoji transformations, to test the robustness of LLMs against these cloaking perturbations. Our findings reveal that existing models significantly underperform in detecting offensive content when these perturbations are applied. We provide an in-depth analysis of how different types of offensive content are affected by these perturbations and explore the alignment between human and model explanations of offensiveness. Our work highlights the urgent need for more advanced techniques in offensive language detection to combat the evolving tactics used to evade detection mechanisms.

Who Wrote it and Why? Prompting Large-Language Models for Authorship Verification

Authorship verification (AV) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, with applications in forensic analysis, plagiarism detection, and identification of deceptive content. Existing AV techniques, including traditional stylometric and deep learning approaches, face limitations in terms of data requirements and lack of explainability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes PromptAV, a novel technique that leverages Large-Language Models (LLMs) for AV by providing step-by-step stylometric explanation prompts. PromptAV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, operates effectively with limited training data, and enhances interpretability through intuitive explanations, showcasing its potential as an effective and interpretable solution for the AV task.

Yelp Reviews and Food Types: A Comparative Analysis of Ratings, Sentiments, and Topics

This study examines the relationship between Yelp reviews and food types, investigating how ratings, sentiments, and topics vary across different types of food. Specifically, we analyze how ratings and sentiments of reviews vary across food types, cluster food types based on ratings and sentiments, infer review topics using machine learning models, and compare topic distributions among different food types. Our analyses reveal that some food types have similar ratings, sentiments, and topics distributions, while others have distinct patterns. We identify four clusters of food types based on ratings and sentiments and find that reviewers tend to focus on different topics when reviewing certain food types. These findings have important implications for understanding user behavior and cultural influence on digital media platforms and promoting cross-cultural understanding and appreciation.

Knowledge-refined Denoising Network for Robust Recommendation

Knowledge graph (KG), which contains rich side information, becomes an essential part to boost the recommendation performance and improve its explainability. However, existing knowledge-aware recommendation methods directly perform information propagation on KG and user-item bipartite graph, ignoring the impacts of \textit{task-irrelevant knowledge propagation} and \textit{vulnerability to interaction noise}, which limits their performance. To solve these issues, we propose a robust knowledge-aware recommendation framework, called \textit{Knowledge-refined Denoising Network} (KRDN), to prune the task-irrelevant knowledge associations and noisy implicit feedback simultaneously. KRDN consists of an adaptive knowledge refining strategy and a contrastive denoising mechanism, which are able to automatically distill high-quality KG triplets for aggregation and prune noisy implicit feedback respectively. Besides, we also design the self-adapted loss function and the gradient estimator for model optimization. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of KRDN over the state-of-the-art knowledge-aware methods like KGIN, MCCLK, and KGCL, and also outperform robust recommendation models like SGL and SimGCL.

Non-rigid Point Cloud Registration for Middle Ear Diagnostics with Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography

Purpose: Middle ear infection is the most prevalent inflammatory disease, especially among the pediatric population. Current diagnostic methods are subjective and depend on visual cues from an otoscope, which is limited for otologists to identify pathology. To address this shortcoming, endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides both morphological and functional in-vivo measurements of the middle ear. However, due to the shadow of prior structures, interpretation of OCT images is challenging and time-consuming. To facilitate fast diagnosis and measurement, improvement in the readability of OCT data is achieved by merging morphological knowledge from ex-vivo middle ear models with OCT volumetric data, so that OCT applications can be further promoted in daily clinical settings. Methods: We propose C2P-Net: a two-staged non-rigid registration pipeline for complete to partial point clouds, which are sampled from ex-vivo and in-vivo OCT models, respectively. To overcome the lack of labeled training data, a fast and effective generation pipeline in Blender3D is designed to simulate middle ear shapes and extract in-vivo noisy and partial point clouds. Results: We evaluate the performance of C2P-Net through experiments on both synthetic and real OCT datasets. The results demonstrate that C2P-Net is generalized to unseen middle ear point clouds and capable of handling realistic noise and incompleteness in synthetic and real OCT data. Conclusion: In this work, we aim to enable diagnosis of middle ear structures with the assistance of OCT images. We propose C2P-Net: a two-staged non-rigid registration pipeline for point clouds to support the interpretation of in-vivo noisy and partial OCT images for the first time. Code is available at: https://gitlab.com/nct\_tso\_public/c2p-net.

Self-Guided Learning to Denoise for Robust Recommendation

The ubiquity of implicit feedback makes them the default choice to build modern recommender systems. Generally speaking, observed interactions are considered as positive samples, while unobserved interactions are considered as negative ones. However, implicit feedback is inherently noisy because of the ubiquitous presence of noisy-positive and noisy-negative interactions. Recently, some studies have noticed the importance of denoising implicit feedback for recommendations, and enhanced the robustness of recommendation models to some extent. Nonetheless, they typically fail to (1) capture the hard yet clean interactions for learning comprehensive user preference, and (2) provide a universal denoising solution that can be applied to various kinds of recommendation models. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the memorization effect of recommendation models, and propose a new denoising paradigm, i.e., Self-Guided Denoising Learning (SGDL), which is able to collect memorized interactions at the early stage of the training (i.e., "noise-resistant" period), and leverage those data as denoising signals to guide the following training (i.e., "noise-sensitive" period) of the model in a meta-learning manner. Besides, our method can automatically switch its learning phase at the memorization point from memorization to self-guided learning, and select clean and informative memorized data via a novel adaptive denoising scheduler to improve the robustness. We incorporate SGDL with four representative recommendation models (i.e., NeuMF, CDAE, NGCF and LightGCN) and different loss functions (i.e., binary cross-entropy and BPR loss). The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGDL over the state-of-the-art denoising methods like T-CE, IR, DeCA, and even state-of-the-art robust graph-based methods like SGCN and SGL.