FinXABSA: Explainable Finance through Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents a novel approach for explainability in financial analysis by utilizing the Pearson correlation coefficient to establish a relationship between aspect-based sentiment analysis and stock prices. The proposed methodology involves constructing an aspect list from financial news articles and analyzing sentiment intensity scores for each aspect. These scores are then compared to the stock prices for the relevant companies using the Pearson coefficient to determine any significant correlations. The results indicate that the proposed approach provides a more detailed and accurate understanding of the relationship between sentiment analysis and stock prices, which can be useful for investors and financial analysts in making informed decisions. Additionally, this methodology offers a transparent and interpretable way to explain the sentiment analysis results and their impact on stock prices. Overall, the findings of this paper demonstrate the importance of explainability in financial analysis and highlight the potential benefits of utilizing the Pearson coefficient for analyzing aspect-based sentiment analysis and stock prices. The proposed approach offers a valuable tool for understanding the complex relationships between financial news sentiment and stock prices, providing a new perspective on the financial market and aiding in making informed investment decisions.

Exploring Multimodal Sentiment Analysis via CBAM Attention and Double-layer BiLSTM Architecture

Because multimodal data contains more modal information, multimodal sentiment analysis has become a recent research hotspot. However, redundant information is easily involved in feature fusion after feature extraction, which has a certain impact on the feature representation after fusion. Therefore, in this papaer, we propose a new multimodal sentiment analysis model. In our model, we use BERT + BiLSTM as new feature extractor to capture the long-distance dependencies in sentences and consider the position information of input sequences to obtain richer text features. To remove redundant information and make the network pay more attention to the correlation between image and text features, CNN and CBAM attention are added after splicing text features and picture features, to improve the feature representation ability. On the MVSA-single dataset and HFM dataset, compared with the baseline model, the ACC of our model is improved by 1.78% and 1.91%, and the F1 value is enhanced by 3.09% and 2.0%, respectively. The experimental results show that our model achieves a sound effect, similar to the advanced model.

Types of Approaches, Applications and Challenges in the Development of Sentiment Analysis Systems

Today, the web has become a mandatory platform to express users' opinions, emotions and feelings about various events. Every person using his smartphone can give his opinion about the purchase of a product, the occurrence of an accident, the occurrence of a new disease, etc. in blogs and social networks such as (Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram) register. Therefore, millions of comments are recorded daily and it creates a huge volume of unstructured text data that can extract useful knowledge from this type of data by using natural language processing methods. Sentiment analysis is one of the important applications of natural language processing and machine learning, which allows us to analyze the sentiments of comments and other textual information recorded by web users. Therefore, the analysis of sentiments, approaches and challenges in this field will be explained in the following.

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

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

Sentiment analysis and opinion mining on educational data: A survey

Sentiment analysis AKA opinion mining is one of the most widely used NLP applications to identify human intentions from their reviews. In the education sector, opinion mining is used to listen to student opinions and enhance their learning-teaching practices pedagogically. With advancements in sentiment annotation techniques and AI methodologies, student comments can be labelled with their sentiment orientation without much human intervention. In this review article, (1) we consider the role of emotional analysis in education from four levels: document level, sentence level, entity level, and aspect level, (2) sentiment annotation techniques including lexicon-based and corpus-based approaches for unsupervised annotations are explored, (3) the role of AI in sentiment analysis with methodologies like machine learning, deep learning, and transformers are discussed, (4) the impact of sentiment analysis on educational procedures to enhance pedagogy, decision-making, and evaluation are presented. Educational institutions have been widely invested to build sentiment analysis tools and process their student feedback to draw their opinions and insights. Applications built on sentiment analysis of student feedback are reviewed in this study. Challenges in sentiment analysis like multi-polarity, polysemous, negation words, and opinion spam detection are explored and their trends in the research space are discussed. The future directions of sentiment analysis in education are discussed.

SynGen: A Syntactic Plug-and-play Module for Generative Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a sentiment analysis task at fine-grained level. Recently, generative frameworks have attracted increasing attention in ABSA due to their ability to unify subtasks and their continuity to upstream pre-training tasks. However, these generative models suffer from the neighboring dependency problem that induces neighboring words to get higher attention. In this paper, we propose SynGen, a plug-and-play syntactic information aware module. As a plug-in module, our SynGen can be easily applied to any generative framework backbones. The key insight of our module is to add syntactic inductive bias to attention assignment and thus direct attention to the correct target words. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first one to introduce syntactic information to generative ABSA frameworks. Our module design is based on two main principles: (1) maintaining the structural integrity of backbone PLMs and (2) disentangling the added syntactic information and original semantic information. Empirical results on four popular ABSA datasets demonstrate that SynGen enhanced model achieves a comparable performance to the state-of-the-art model with relaxed labeling specification and less training consumption.

Soft Prompt Guided Joint Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Aspect term extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims at detecting customer's opinion targets from reviews on product or service. The traditional supervised models can achieve promising results with annotated datasets, however, the performance dramatically decreases when they are applied to the task of cross-domain aspect term extraction. Existing cross-domain transfer learning methods either directly inject linguistic features into Language models, making it difficult to transfer linguistic knowledge to target domain, or rely on the fixed predefined prompts, which is time-consuming to construct the prompts over all potential aspect term spans. To resolve the limitations, we propose a soft prompt-based joint learning method for cross domain aspect term extraction in this paper. Specifically, by incorporating external linguistic features, the proposed method learn domain-invariant representations between source and target domains via multiple objectives, which bridges the gap between domains with varied distributions of aspect terms. Further, the proposed method interpolates a set of transferable soft prompts consisted of multiple learnable vectors that are beneficial to detect aspect terms in target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cross-domain aspect terms extraction.

InstructABSA: Instruction Learning for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we present InstructABSA, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) using instruction learning paradigm for all ABSA subtasks: Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), Aspect Term Sentiment Classification (ATSC), and Joint Task modeling. Our method introduces positive, negative, and neutral examples to each training sample, and instruction tunes the model (Tk-Instruct Base) for each ABSA subtask, yielding significant performance improvements. Experimental results on the Sem Eval 2014 dataset demonstrate that InstructABSA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on all three ABSA subtasks (ATE, ATSC, and Joint Task) by a significant margin, outperforming 7x larger models. In particular, InstructABSA surpasses the SOTA on the restaurant ATE subtask by 7.31% points and on the Laptop Joint Task by 8.63% points. Our results also suggest a strong generalization ability to unseen tasks across all three subtasks.

TextMI: Textualize Multimodal Information for Integrating Non-verbal Cues in Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained large language models have recently achieved ground-breaking performance in a wide variety of language understanding tasks. However, the same model can not be applied to multimodal behavior understanding tasks (e.g., video sentiment/humor detection) unless non-verbal features (e.g., acoustic and visual) can be integrated with language. Jointly modeling multiple modalities significantly increases the model complexity, and makes the training process data-hungry. While an enormous amount of text data is available via the web, collecting large-scale multimodal behavioral video datasets is extremely expensive, both in terms of time and money. In this paper, we investigate whether large language models alone can successfully incorporate non-verbal information when they are presented in textual form. We present a way to convert the acoustic and visual information into corresponding textual descriptions and concatenate them with the spoken text. We feed this augmented input to a pre-trained BERT model and fine-tune it on three downstream multimodal tasks: sentiment, humor, and sarcasm detection. Our approach, TextMI, significantly reduces model complexity, adds interpretability to the model's decision, and can be applied for a diverse set of tasks while achieving superior (multimodal sarcasm detection) or near SOTA (multimodal sentiment analysis and multimodal humor detection) performance. We propose TextMI as a general, competitive baseline for multimodal behavioral analysis tasks, particularly in a low-resource setting.