Enhancing Visual Sentiment Analysis via Semiotic Isotopy-Guided Dataset Construction

Visual Sentiment Analysis (VSA) is a challenging task due to the vast diversity of emotionally salient images and the inherent difficulty of acquiring sufficient data to capture this variability comprehensively. Key obstacles include building large-scale VSA datasets and developing effective methodologies that enable algorithms to identify emotionally significant elements within an image. These challenges are reflected in the limited generalization performance of VSA algorithms and models when trained and tested across different datasets. Starting from a pool of existing data collections, our approach enables the creation of a new larger dataset that not only contains a wider variety of images than the original ones, but also permits training new models with improved capability to focus on emotionally relevant combinations of image elements. This is achieved through the integration of the semiotic isotopy concept within the dataset creation process, providing deeper insights into the emotional content of images. Empirical evaluations show that models trained on a dataset generated with our method consistently outperform those trained on the original data collections, achieving superior generalization across major VSA benchmarks

Comparative Evaluation of Embedding Representations for Financial News Sentiment Analysis

Financial sentiment analysis enhances market understanding; however, standard natural language processing approaches encounter significant challenges when applied to small datasets. This study provides a comparative evaluation of embedding-based methods for financial news sentiment classification in resource-constrained environments. Word2Vec, GloVe, and sentence transformer representations are evaluated in combination with gradient boosting on manually labeled headlines. Experimental results identify a substantial gap between validation and test performance, with models performing worse than trivial baselines despite strong validation metrics. The analysis demonstrates that pretrained embeddings yield diminishing returns below a critical data sufficiency threshold, and that small validation sets contribute to overfitting during model selection. Practical application is illustrated through weekly sentiment aggregation and narrative summarization for market monitoring workflows. The findings offer empirical evidence that embedding quality alone cannot address fundamental data scarcity in sentiment classification. For practitioners operating with limited resources, the results indicate the need to consider alternative approaches such as few-shot learning, data augmentation, or lexicon-enhanced hybrid methods when labeled samples are scarce.

LLM-MC-Affect: LLM-Based Monte Carlo Modeling of Affective Trajectories and Latent Ambiguity for Interpersonal Dynamic Insight

Emotional coordination is a core property of human interaction that shapes how relational meaning is constructed in real time. While text-based affect inference has become increasingly feasible, prior approaches often treat sentiment as a deterministic point estimate for individual speakers, failing to capture the inherent subjectivity, latent ambiguity, and sequential coupling found in mutual exchanges. We introduce LLM-MC-Affect, a probabilistic framework that characterizes emotion not as a static label, but as a continuous latent probability distribution defined over an affective space. By leveraging stochastic LLM decoding and Monte Carlo estimation, the methodology approximates these distributions to derive high-fidelity sentiment trajectories that explicitly quantify both central affective tendencies and perceptual ambiguity. These trajectories enable a structured analysis of interpersonal coupling through sequential cross-correlation and slope-based indicators, identifying leading or lagging influences between interlocutors. To validate the interpretive capacity of this approach, we utilize teacher-student instructional dialogues as a representative case study, where our quantitative indicators successfully distill high-level interaction insights such as effective scaffolding. This work establishes a scalable and deployable pathway for understanding interpersonal dynamics, offering a generalizable solution that extends beyond education to broader social and behavioral research.

Exploring Zero-Shot ACSA with Unified Meaning Representation in Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) provides granular insights by identifying specific themes within reviews and their associated sentiment. While supervised learning approaches dominate this field, the scarcity and high cost of annotated data for new domains present significant barriers. We argue that leveraging large language models (LLMs) in a zero-shot setting is a practical alternative where resources for data annotation are limited. In this work, we propose a novel Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique that utilises an intermediate Unified Meaning Representation (UMR) to structure the reasoning process for the ACSA task. We evaluate this UMR-based approach against a standard CoT baseline across three models (Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemini-2.5-Pro) and four diverse datasets. Our findings suggest that UMR effectiveness may be model-dependent. Whilst preliminary results indicate comparable performance for mid-sized models such as Qwen3-8B, these observations warrant further investigation, particularly regarding the potential applicability to smaller model architectures. Further research is required to establish the generalisability of these findings across different model scales.

A Novel Graph-Sequence Learning Model for Inductive Text Classification

Text classification plays an important role in various downstream text-related tasks, such as sentiment analysis, fake news detection, and public opinion analysis. Recently, text classification based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has made significant progress due to their strong capabilities of structural relationship learning. However, these approaches still face two major limitations. First, these approaches fail to fully consider the diverse structural information across word pairs, e.g., co-occurrence, syntax, and semantics. Furthermore, they neglect sequence information in the text graph structure information learning module and can not classify texts with new words and relations. In this paper, we propose a Novel Graph-Sequence Learning Model for Inductive Text Classification (TextGSL) to address the previously mentioned issues. More specifically, we construct a single text-level graph for all words in each text and establish different edge types based on the diverse relationships between word pairs. Building upon this, we design an adaptive multi-edge message-passing paradigm to aggregate diverse structural information between word pairs. Additionally, sequential information among text data can be captured by the proposed TextGSL through the incorporation of Transformer layers. Therefore, TextGSL can learn more discriminative text representations. TextGSL has been comprehensively compared with several strong baselines. The experimental results on diverse benchmarking datasets demonstrate that TextGSL outperforms these baselines in terms of accuracy.

Subjective Question Generation and Answer Evaluation using NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most revolutionary technologies today. It uses artificial intelligence to understand human text and spoken words. It is used for text summarization, grammar checking, sentiment analysis, and advanced chatbots and has many more potential use cases. Furthermore, it has also made its mark on the education sector. Much research and advancements have already been conducted on objective question generation; however, automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation are still in progress. An automated system to generate subjective questions and evaluate the answers can help teachers assess student work and enhance the student's learning experience by allowing them to self-assess their understanding after reading an article or a chapter of a book. This research aims to improve current NLP models or make a novel one for automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation from text input.

Detection and Analysis of Sensitive and Illegal Content on the Ethereum Blockchain Using Machine Learning Techniques

Blockchain technology, lauded for its transparent and immutable nature, introduces a novel trust model. However, its decentralized structure raises concerns about potential inclusion of malicious or illegal content. This study focuses on Ethereum, presenting a data identification and restoration algorithm. Successfully recovering 175 common files, 296 images, and 91,206 texts, we employed the FastText algorithm for sentiment analysis, achieving a 0.9 accuracy after parameter tuning. Classification revealed 70,189 neutral, 5,208 positive, and 15,810 negative texts, aiding in identifying sensitive or illicit information. Leveraging the NSFWJS library, we detected seven indecent images with 100% accuracy. Our findings expose the coexistence of benign and harmful content on the Ethereum blockchain, including personal data, explicit images, divisive language, and racial discrimination. Notably, sensitive information targeted Chinese government officials. Proposing preventative measures, our study offers valuable insights for public comprehension of blockchain technology and regulatory agency guidance. The algorithms employed present innovative solutions to address blockchain data privacy and security concerns.

From Fake Focus to Real Precision: Confusion-Driven Adversarial Attention Learning in Transformers

Transformer-based models have been widely adopted for sentiment analysis tasks due to their exceptional ability to capture contextual information. However, these methods often exhibit suboptimal accuracy in certain scenarios. By analyzing their attention distributions, we observe that existing models tend to allocate attention primarily to common words, overlooking less popular yet highly task-relevant terms, which significantly impairs overall performance. To address this issue, we propose an Adversarial Feedback for Attention(AFA) training mechanism that enables the model to automatically redistribute attention weights to appropriate focal points without requiring manual annotations. This mechanism incorporates a dynamic masking strategy that attempts to mask various words to deceive a discriminator, while the discriminator strives to detect significant differences induced by these masks. Additionally, leveraging the sensitivity of Transformer models to token-level perturbations, we employ a policy gradient approach to optimize attention distributions, which facilitates efficient and rapid convergence. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, applying this training mechanism to enhance attention in large language models yields a further performance improvement of 12.6%

Detecting Emotion Drift in Mental Health Text Using Pre-Trained Transformers

This study investigates emotion drift: the change in emotional state across a single text, within mental health-related messages. While sentiment analysis typically classifies an entire message as positive, negative, or neutral, the nuanced shift of emotions over the course of a message is often overlooked. This study detects sentence-level emotions and measures emotion drift scores using pre-trained transformer models such as DistilBERT and RoBERTa. The results provide insights into patterns of emotional escalation or relief in mental health conversations. This methodology can be applied to better understand emotional dynamics in content.

Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien's The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python

This study analyzes the emotional tone of dialogue in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) using computational text analysis. Dialogue was extracted with regular expressions, then preprocessed, and scored using the NRC-VAD lexicon to quantify emotional dimensions. The results show that the dialogue maintains a generally positive (high valence) and calm (low arousal) tone, with a gradually increasing sense of agency (dominance) as the story progresses. These patterns reflect the novel's emotional rhythm: moments of danger and excitement are regularly balanced by humor, camaraderie, and relief. Visualizations -- including emotional trajectory graphs and word clouds -- highlight how Tolkien's language cycles between tension and comfort. By combining computational tools with literary interpretation, this study demonstrates how digital methods can uncover subtle emotional structures in literature, revealing the steady rhythm and emotional modulation that shape the storytelling in The Hobbit.