AILS-NTUA at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Efficient Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we present AILS-NTUA system for Track-A of SemEval-2026 Task 3 on Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA), which encompasses three complementary problems: Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Regression (DimASR), Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (DimASTE), and Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Quadruplet Prediction (DimASQP) within a multilingual and multi-domain framework. Our methodology combines fine-tuning of language-appropriate encoder backbones for continuous aspect-level sentiment prediction with language-specific instruction tuning of large language models using LoRA for structured triplet and quadruplet extraction. This unified yet task-adaptive design emphasizes parameter-efficient specialization across languages and domains, enabling reduced training and inference requirements while maintaining strong effectiveness. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed models achieve competitive performance and consistently surpass the provided baselines across most evaluation settings.

The Company You Keep: How LLMs Respond to Dark Triad Traits

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this behavior is encouraged, it may become problematic when interacting with user prompts that reflect negative social tendencies. Such responses risk amplifying harmful behavior rather than mitigating it. In this study, we examine how LLMs respond to user prompts expressing varying degrees of Dark Triad traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy) using a curated dataset. Our analysis reveals differences across models, whereby all models predominantly exhibit corrective behavior, while showing reinforcing output in certain cases. Model behavior also depends on the severity level and differs in the sentiment of the response. Our findings raise implications for designing safer conversational systems that can detect and respond appropriately when users escalate from benign to harmful requests.

AnnoABSA: A Web-Based Annotation Tool for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Suggestions

We introduce AnnoABSA, the first web-based annotation tool to support the full spectrum of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks. The tool is highly customizable, enabling flexible configuration of sentiment elements and task-specific requirements. Alongside manual annotation, AnnoABSA provides optional Large Language Model (LLM)-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) suggestions that offer context-aware assistance in a human-in-the-loop approach, keeping the human annotator in control. To improve prediction quality over time, the system retrieves the ten most similar examples that are already annotated and adds them as few-shot examples in the prompt, ensuring that suggestions become increasingly accurate as the annotation process progresses. Released as open-source software under the MIT License, AnnoABSA is freely accessible and easily extendable for research and practical applications.

nchellwig at SemEval-2026 Task 3: Self-Consistent Structured Generation (SCSG) for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis using Large Language Models

We present Self-Consistent Structured Generation (SCSG) for Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in SemEval-2026 Task 3 (Track A). SCSG enhances prediction reliability by executing a LoRA-adapted large language model multiple times per instance, retaining only tuples that achieve a majority consensus across runs. To mitigate the computational overhead of multiple forward passes, we leverage vLLM's PagedAttention mechanism for efficient key--value cache reuse. Evaluation across 6 languages and 8 language--domain combinations demonstrates that self-consistency with 15 executions yields statistically significant improvements over single-inference prompting, with our system (leveraging Gemma 3) ranking in the top seven across all settings, achieving second place on three out of four English subsets and first place on Tatar-Restaurant for DimASTE.

LLM-as-an-Annotator: Training Lightweight Models with LLM-Annotated Examples for Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction

Training models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks requires manually annotated data, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper introduces LA-ABSA, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Model (LLM)-generated annotations to fine-tune lightweight models for complex ABSA tasks. We evaluate our approach on five datasets for Target Aspect Sentiment Detection (TASD) and Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP). Our approach outperformed previously reported augmentation strategies and achieved competitive performance with LLM-prompting in low-resource scenarios, while providing substantial energy efficiency benefits. For example, using 50 annotated examples for in-context learning (ICL) to guide the annotation of unlabeled data, LA-ABSA achieved an F1 score of 49.85 for ASQP on the SemEval Rest16 dataset, closely matching the performance of ICL prompting with Gemma-3-27B (51.10), while requiring significantly lower computational resources.

Task Complexity Matters: An Empirical Study of Reasoning in LLMs for Sentiment Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have fueled a compelling narrative that reasoning universally improves performance across language tasks. We test this claim through a comprehensive evaluation of 504 configurations across seven model families--including adaptive, conditional, and reinforcement learning-based reasoning architectures--on sentiment analysis datasets of varying granularity (binary, five-class, and 27-class emotion). Our findings reveal that reasoning effectiveness is strongly task-dependent, challenging prevailing assumptions: (1) Reasoning shows task-complexity dependence--binary classification degrades up to -19.9 F1 percentage points (pp), while 27-class emotion recognition gains up to +16.0pp; (2) Distilled reasoning variants underperform base models by 3-18 pp on simpler tasks, though few-shot prompting enables partial recovery; (3) Few-shot learning improves over zero-shot in most cases regardless of model type, with gains varying by architecture and task complexity; (4) Pareto frontier analysis shows base models dominate efficiency-performance trade-offs, with reasoning justified only for complex emotion recognition despite 2.1x-54x computational overhead. We complement these quantitative findings with qualitative error analysis revealing that reasoning degrades simpler tasks through systematic over-deliberation, offering mechanistic insight beyond the high-level overthinking hypothesis.

Extending Czech Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Opinion Terms: Dataset and LLM Benchmarks

This paper introduces a novel Czech dataset in the restaurant domain for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), enriched with annotations of opinion terms. The dataset supports three distinct ABSA tasks involving opinion terms, accommodating varying levels of complexity. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments using modern Transformer-based models, including large language models (LLMs), in monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual settings. To address cross-lingual challenges, we propose a translation and label alignment methodology leveraging LLMs, which yields consistent improvements. Our results highlight the strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art models, especially when handling the linguistic intricacies of low-resource languages like Czech. A detailed error analysis reveals key challenges, including the detection of subtle opinion terms and nuanced sentiment expressions. The dataset establishes a new benchmark for Czech ABSA, and our proposed translation-alignment approach offers a scalable solution for adapting ABSA resources to other low-resource languages.

Exa-PSD: a new Persian sentiment analysis dataset on Twitter

Today, Social networks such as Twitter are the most widely used platforms for communication of people. Analyzing this data has useful information to recognize the opinion of people in tweets. Sentiment analysis plays a vital role in NLP, which identifies the opinion of the individuals about a specific topic. Natural language processing in Persian has many challenges despite the adventure of strong language models. The datasets available in Persian are generally in special topics such as products, foods, hotels, etc while users may use ironies, colloquial phrases in social media To overcome these challenges, there is a necessity for having a dataset of Persian sentiment analysis on Twitter. In this paper, we introduce the Exa sentiment analysis Persian dataset, which is collected from Persian tweets. This dataset contains 12,000 tweets, annotated by 5 native Persian taggers. The aforementioned data is labeled in 3 classes: positive, neutral and negative. We present the characteristics and statistics of this dataset and use the pre-trained Pars Bert and Roberta as the base model to evaluate this dataset. Our evaluation reached a 79.87 Macro F-score, which shows the model and data can be adequately valuable for a sentiment analysis system.

Evaluating the Usage of African-American Vernacular English in Large Language Models

In AI, most evaluations of natural language understanding tasks are conducted in standardized dialects such as Standard American English (SAE). In this work, we investigate how accurately large language models (LLMs) represent African American Vernacular English (AAVE). We analyze three LLMs to compare their usage of AAVE to the usage of humans who natively speak AAVE. We first analyzed interviews from the Corpus of Regional African American Language and TwitterAAE to identify the typical contexts where people use AAVE grammatical features such as ain't. We then prompted the LLMs to produce text in AAVE and compared the model-generated text to human usage patterns. We find that, in many cases, there are substantial differences between AAVE usage in LLMs and humans: LLMs usually underuse and misuse grammatical features characteristic of AAVE. Furthermore, through sentiment analysis and manual inspection, we found that the models replicated stereotypes about African Americans. These results highlight the need for more diversity in training data and the incorporation of fairness methods to mitigate the perpetuation of stereotypes.

iMiGUE-Speech: A Spontaneous Speech Dataset for Affective Analysis

This work presents iMiGUE-Speech, an extension of the iMiGUE dataset that provides a spontaneous affective corpus for studying emotional and affective states. The new release focuses on speech and enriches the original dataset with additional metadata, including speech transcripts, speaker-role separation between interviewer and interviewee, and word-level forced alignments. Unlike existing emotional speech datasets that rely on acted or laboratory-elicited emotions, iMiGUE-Speech captures spontaneous affect arising naturally from real match outcomes. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset and establish initial benchmarks, we introduce two evaluation tasks for comparative assessment: speech emotion recognition and transcript-based sentiment analysis. These tasks leverage state-of-the-art pre-trained representations to assess the dataset's ability to capture spontaneous affective states from both acoustic and linguistic modalities. iMiGUE-Speech can also be synchronously paired with micro-gesture annotations from the original iMiGUE dataset, forming a uniquely multimodal resource for studying speech-gesture affective dynamics. The extended dataset is available at https://github.com/CV-AC/imigue-speech.