Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy

Google Search increasingly surfaces AI-generated content through features like AI Overviews (AIO) and Featured Snippets (FS), which users frequently rely on despite having no control over their presentation. Through a systematic algorithm audit of 1,508 real baby care and pregnancy-related queries, we evaluate the quality and consistency of these information displays. Our robust evaluation framework assesses multiple quality dimensions, including answer consistency, relevance, presence of medical safeguards, source categories, and sentiment alignment. Our results reveal concerning gaps in information consistency, with information in AIO and FS displayed on the same search result page being inconsistent with each other in 33% of cases. Despite high relevance scores, both features critically lack medical safeguards (present in just 11% of AIO and 7% of FS responses). While health and wellness websites dominate source categories for both, AIO and FS, FS also often link to commercial sources. These findings have important implications for public health information access and demonstrate the need for stronger quality controls in AI-mediated health information. Our methodology provides a transferable framework for auditing AI systems across high-stakes domains where information quality directly impacts user well-being.

Data Value in the Age of Scaling: Understanding LLM Scaling Dynamics Under Real-Synthetic Data Mixtures

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is fueled by the growing reliance on datasets that blend real and synthetic data. While synthetic data offers scalability and cost-efficiency, it often introduces systematic distributional discrepancies, particularly underrepresenting long-tail knowledge due to truncation effects from data generation mechanisms like top-p sampling, temperature scaling, and finite sampling. These discrepancies pose fundamental challenges in characterizing and evaluating the utility of mixed real-synthetic datasets. In this paper, we identify a three-phase scaling behavior characterized by two breakpoints that reflect transitions in model behavior across learning head and tail knowledge. We further derive an LLM generalization bound designed for real and synthetic mixtures, revealing several key factors that govern their generalization performance. Building on our theoretical findings, we propose an effective yet efficient data valuation method that scales to large-scale datasets. Comprehensive experiments across four tasks, including image classification, sentiment classification, instruction following, and complex reasoning, demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in data valuation with significantly low computational cost.

Aspect-Level Obfuscated Sentiment in Thai Financial Disclosures and Its Impact on Abnormal Returns

Understanding sentiment in financial documents is crucial for gaining insights into market behavior. These reports often contain obfuscated language designed to present a positive or neutral outlook, even when underlying conditions may be less favorable. This paper presents a novel approach using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to decode obfuscated sentiment in Thai financial annual reports. We develop specific guidelines for annotating obfuscated sentiment in these texts and annotate more than one hundred financial reports. We then benchmark various text classification models on this annotated dataset, demonstrating strong performance in sentiment classification. Additionally, we conduct an event study to evaluate the real-world implications of our sentiment analysis on stock prices. Our results suggest that market reactions are selectively influenced by specific aspects within the reports. Our findings underscore the complexity of sentiment analysis in financial texts and highlight the importance of addressing obfuscated language to accurately assess market sentiment.

AHaSIS: Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis for Arabic Dialects

The hospitality industry in the Arab world increasingly relies on customer feedback to shape services, driving the need for advanced Arabic sentiment analysis tools. To address this challenge, the Sentiment Analysis on Arabic Dialects in the Hospitality Domain shared task focuses on Sentiment Detection in Arabic Dialects. This task leverages a multi-dialect, manually curated dataset derived from hotel reviews originally written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and translated into Saudi and Moroccan (Darija) dialects. The dataset consists of 538 sentiment-balanced reviews spanning positive, neutral, and negative categories. Translations were validated by native speakers to ensure dialectal accuracy and sentiment preservation. This resource supports the development of dialect-aware NLP systems for real-world applications in customer experience analysis. More than 40 teams have registered for the shared task, with 12 submitting systems during the evaluation phase. The top-performing system achieved an F1 score of 0.81, demonstrating the feasibility and ongoing challenges of sentiment analysis across Arabic dialects.

History Rhymes: Macro-Contextual Retrieval for Robust Financial Forecasting

Financial markets are inherently non-stationary: structural breaks and macroeconomic regime shifts often cause forecasting models to fail when deployed out of distribution (OOD). Conventional multimodal approaches that simply fuse numerical indicators and textual sentiment rarely adapt to such shifts. We introduce macro-contextual retrieval, a retrieval-augmented forecasting framework that grounds each prediction in historically analogous macroeconomic regimes. The method jointly embeds macro indicators (e.g., CPI, unemployment, yield spread, GDP growth) and financial news sentiment in a shared similarity space, enabling causal retrieval of precedent periods during inference without retraining. Trained on seventeen years of S&P 500 data (2007-2023) and evaluated OOD on AAPL (2024) and XOM (2024), the framework consistently narrows the CV to OOD performance gap. Macro-conditioned retrieval achieves the only positive out-of-sample trading outcomes (AAPL: PF=1.18, Sharpe=0.95; XOM: PF=1.16, Sharpe=0.61), while static numeric, text-only, and naive multimodal baselines collapse under regime shifts. Beyond metric gains, retrieved neighbors form interpretable evidence chains that correspond to recognizable macro contexts, such as inflationary or yield-curve inversion phases, supporting causal interpretability and transparency. By operationalizing the principle that "financial history may not repeat, but it often rhymes," this work demonstrates that macro-aware retrieval yields robust, explainable forecasts under distributional change. All datasets, models, and source code are publicly available.

Semantic Multiplexing

Mobile devices increasingly require the parallel execution of several computing tasks offloaded at the wireless edge. Existing communication systems only support parallel transmissions at the bit level, which fundamentally limits the number of tasks that can be concurrently processed. To address this bottleneck, this paper introduces the new concept of Semantic Multiplexing. Our approach shifts stream multiplexing from bits to tasks by merging multiple task-related compressed representations into a single semantic representation. As such, Semantic Multiplexing can multiplex more tasks than the number of physical channels without adding antennas or widening bandwidth by extending the effective degrees of freedom at the semantic layer, without contradicting Shannon capacity rules. We have prototyped Semantic Multiplexing on an experimental testbed with Jetson Orin Nano and millimeter-wave software-defined radios and tested its performance on image classification and sentiment analysis while comparing to several existing baselines in semantic communications. Our experiments demonstrate that Semantic Multiplexing allows jointly processing multiple tasks at the semantic level while maintaining sufficient task accuracy. For example, image classification accuracy drops by less than 4% when increasing from 2 to 8 the number of tasks multiplexed over a 4$\times$4 channel. Semantic Multiplexing reduces latency, energy consumption, and communication load respectively by up to 8$\times$, 25$\times$, and 54$\times$ compared to the baselines while keeping comparable performance. We pledge to publicly share the complete software codebase and the collected datasets for reproducibility.

From Passive to Persuasive: Steering Emotional Nuance in Human-AI Negotiation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output or require extensive fine-tuning. This paper demonstrates that targeted activation engineering can steer LLaMA 3.1-8B to exhibit more human-like emotional nuances. We first employ attribution patching to identify causally influential components, to find a key intervention locus by observing activation patterns during diagnostic conversational tasks. We then derive emotional expression vectors from the difference in the activations generated by contrastive text pairs (positive vs. negative examples of target emotions). Applying these vectors to new conversational prompts significantly enhances emotional characteristics: steered responses show increased positive sentiment (e.g., joy, trust) and more frequent first-person pronoun usage, indicative of greater personal engagement. Our findings offer a precise and interpretable framework and new directions for the study of conversational AI.

Opinion Mining and Analysis Using Hybrid Deep Neural Networks

Understanding customer attitudes has become a critical component of decision-making due to the growing influence of social media and e-commerce. Text-based opinions are the most structured, hence playing an important role in sentiment analysis. Most of the existing methods, which include lexicon-based approaches and traditional machine learning techniques, are insufficient for handling contextual nuances and scalability. While the latter has limitations in model performance and generalization, deep learning (DL) has achieved improvement, especially on semantic relationship capturing with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The aim of the study is to enhance opinion mining by introducing a hybrid deep neural network model that combines a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BGRU) and long short-term memory (LSTM) layers to improve sentiment analysis, particularly addressing challenges such as contextual nuance, scalability, and class imbalance. To substantiate the efficacy of the proposed model, we conducted comprehensive experiments utilizing benchmark datasets, encompassing IMDB movie critiques and Amazon product evaluations. The introduced hybrid BGRULSTM (HBGRU-LSTM) architecture attained a testing accuracy of 95%, exceeding the performance of traditional DL frameworks such as LSTM (93.06%), CNN+LSTM (93.31%), and GRU+LSTM (92.20%). Moreover, our model exhibited a noteworthy enhancement in recall for negative sentiments, escalating from 86% (unbalanced dataset) to 96% (balanced dataset), thereby ensuring a more equitable and just sentiment classification. Furthermore, the model diminished misclassification loss from 20.24% for unbalanced to 13.3% for balanced dataset, signifying enhanced generalization and resilience.

LAET: A Layer-wise Adaptive Ensemble Tuning Framework for Pretrained Language Models

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has transformed the financial industry, enabling advancements in areas such as textual analysis, risk management, and forecasting. Large language models (LLMs) like BloombergGPT and FinMA have set new benchmarks across various financial NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, stock movement prediction, and credit risk assessment. Furthermore, FinMA-ES, a bilingual financial LLM, has also demonstrated strong performance using the FLARE and FLARE-ES benchmarks. However, the high computational demands of these models limit the accessibility of many organizations. To address this, we propose Layer-wise Adaptive Ensemble Tuning (LAET), a novel strategy that selectively fine-tunes the most effective layers of pre-trained LLMs by analyzing hidden state representations while freezing less critical layers. LAET significantly reduces computational overhead while enhancing task-specific performance. Our approach shows strong results in financial NLP tasks, outperforming existing benchmarks and state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4, even with smaller LLMs ($\sim$3B parameters). This work bridges cutting-edge financial NLP research and real-world deployment with efficient and scalable models for financial applications.

Adverbs Revisited: Enhancing WordNet Coverage of Adverbs with a Supersense Taxonomy

WordNet offers rich supersense hierarchies for nouns and verbs, yet adverbs remain underdeveloped, lacking a systematic semantic classification. We introduce a linguistically grounded supersense typology for adverbs, empirically validated through annotation, that captures major semantic domains including manner, temporal, frequency, degree, domain, speaker-oriented, and subject-oriented functions. Results from a pilot annotation study demonstrate that these categories provide broad coverage of adverbs in natural text and can be reliably assigned by human annotators. Incorporating this typology extends WordNet's coverage, aligns it more closely with linguistic theory, and facilitates downstream NLP applications such as word sense disambiguation, event extraction, sentiment analysis, and discourse modeling. We present the proposed supersense categories, annotation outcomes, and directions for future work.