Aspect Extraction from E-Commerce Product and Service Reviews

Aspect Extraction (AE) is a key task in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), yet it remains difficult to apply in low-resource and code-switched contexts like Taglish, a mix of Tagalog and English commonly used in Filipino e-commerce reviews. This paper introduces a comprehensive AE pipeline designed for Taglish, combining rule-based, large language model (LLM)-based, and fine-tuning techniques to address both aspect identification and extraction. A Hierarchical Aspect Framework (HAF) is developed through multi-method topic modeling, along with a dual-mode tagging scheme for explicit and implicit aspects. For aspect identification, four distinct models are evaluated: a Rule-Based system, a Generative LLM (Gemini 2.0 Flash), and two Fine-Tuned Gemma-3 1B models trained on different datasets (Rule-Based vs. LLM-Annotated). Results indicate that the Generative LLM achieved the highest performance across all tasks (Macro F1 0.91), demonstrating superior capability in handling implicit aspects. In contrast, the fine-tuned models exhibited limited performance due to dataset imbalance and architectural capacity constraints. This work contributes a scalable and linguistically adaptive framework for enhancing ABSA in diverse, code-switched environments.

Adaptive Financial Sentiment Analysis for NIFTY 50 via Instruction-Tuned LLMs , RAG and Reinforcement Learning Approaches

Financial sentiment analysis plays a crucial role in informing investment decisions, assessing market risk, and predicting stock price trends. Existing works in financial sentiment analysis have not considered the impact of stock prices or market feedback on sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose an adaptive framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with real-world stock market feedback to improve sentiment classification in the context of the Indian stock market. The proposed methodology fine-tunes the LLaMA 3.2 3B model using instruction-based learning on the SentiFin dataset. To enhance sentiment predictions, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline is employed that dynamically selects multi-source contextual information based on the cosine similarity of the sentence embeddings. Furthermore, a feedback-driven module is introduced that adjusts the reliability of the source by comparing predicted sentiment with actual next-day stock returns, allowing the system to iteratively adapt to market behavior. To generalize this adaptive mechanism across temporal data, a reinforcement learning agent trained using proximal policy optimization (PPO) is incorporated. The PPO agent learns to optimize source weighting policies based on cumulative reward signals from sentiment-return alignment. Experimental results on NIFTY 50 news headlines collected from 2024 to 2025 demonstrate that the proposed system significantly improves classification accuracy, F1-score, and market alignment over baseline models and static retrieval methods. The results validate the potential of combining instruction-tuned LLMs with dynamic feedback and reinforcement learning for robust, market-aware financial sentiment modeling.

NepEMO: A Multi-Label Emotion and Sentiment Analysis on Nepali Reddit with Linguistic Insights and Temporal Trends

Social media (SM) platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit) are increasingly leveraged to share opinions and emotions, specifically during challenging events, such as natural disasters, pandemics, and political elections, and joyful occasions like festivals and celebrations. Among the SM platforms, Reddit provides a unique space for its users to anonymously express their experiences and thoughts on sensitive issues such as health and daily life. In this work, we present a novel dataset, called NepEMO, for multi-label emotion (MLE) and sentiment classification (SC) on the Nepali subreddit post. We curate and build a manually annotated dataset of 4,462 posts (January 2019- June 2025) written in English, Romanised Nepali and Devanagari script for five emotions (fear, anger, sadness, joy, and depression) and three sentiment classes (positive, negative, and neutral). We perform a detailed analysis of posts to capture linguistic insights, including emotion trends, co-occurrence of emotions, sentiment-specific n-grams, and topic modelling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and TF-IDF keyword extraction. Finally, we compare various traditional machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and transformer models for MLE and SC tasks. The result shows that transformer models consistently outperform the ML and DL models for both tasks.

Like a Therapist, But Not: Reddit Narratives of AI in Mental Health Contexts

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support and mental health-related interactions outside clinical settings, yet little is known about how people evaluate and relate to these systems in everyday use. We analyze 5,126 Reddit posts from 47 mental health communities describing experiential or exploratory use of AI for emotional support or therapy. Grounded in the Technology Acceptance Model and therapeutic alliance theory, we develop a theory-informed annotation framework and apply a hybrid LLM-human pipeline to analyze evaluative language, adoption-related attitudes, and relational alignment at scale. Our results show that engagement is shaped primarily by narrated outcomes, trust, and response quality, rather than emotional bond alone. Positive sentiment is most strongly associated with task and goal alignment, while companionship-oriented use more often involves misaligned alliances and reported risks such as dependence and symptom escalation. Overall, this work demonstrates how theory-grounded constructs can be operationalized in large-scale discourse analysis and highlights the importance of studying how users interpret language technologies in sensitive, real-world contexts.

Introducing TrGLUE and SentiTurca: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Turkish General Language Understanding and Sentiment Analysis

Evaluating the performance of various model architectures, such as transformers, large language models (LLMs), and other NLP systems, requires comprehensive benchmarks that measure performance across multiple dimensions. Among these, the evaluation of natural language understanding (NLU) is particularly critical as it serves as a fundamental criterion for assessing model capabilities. Thus, it is essential to establish benchmarks that enable thorough evaluation and analysis of NLU abilities from diverse perspectives. While the GLUE benchmark has set a standard for evaluating English NLU, similar benchmarks have been developed for other languages, such as CLUE for Chinese, FLUE for French, and JGLUE for Japanese. However, no comparable benchmark currently exists for the Turkish language. To address this gap, we introduce TrGLUE, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing a variety of NLU tasks for Turkish. In addition, we present SentiTurca, a specialized benchmark for sentiment analysis. To support researchers, we also provide fine-tuning and evaluation code for transformer-based models, facilitating the effective use of these benchmarks. TrGLUE comprises Turkish-native corpora curated to mirror the domains and task formulations of GLUE-style evaluations, with labels obtained through a semi-automated pipeline that combines strong LLM-based annotation, cross-model agreement checks, and subsequent human validation. This design prioritizes linguistic naturalness, minimizes direct translation artifacts, and yields a scalable, reproducible workflow. With TrGLUE, our goal is to establish a robust evaluation framework for Turkish NLU, empower researchers with valuable resources, and provide insights into generating high-quality semi-automated datasets.

Measuring Social Media Polarization Using Large Language Models and Heuristic Rules

Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed heuristics to systematically analyze and quantify affective polarization in discussions on divisive topics such as climate change and gun control. Unlike most prior approaches that relied on sentiment analysis or predefined classifiers, our method integrates LLMs to extract stance, affective tone, and agreement patterns from large-scale social media discussions. We then apply a rule-based scoring system capable of quantifying affective polarization even in small conversations consisting of single interactions, based on stance alignment, emotional content, and interaction dynamics. Our analysis reveals distinct polarization patterns that are event dependent: (i) anticipation-driven polarization, where extreme polarization escalates before well-publicized events, and (ii) reactive polarization, where intense affective polarization spikes immediately after sudden, high-impact events. By combining AI-driven content annotation with domain-informed scoring, our framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach to measuring affective polarization. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/llm-social-media-polarization.

Cognitive Inference based Feature Pyramid Network for Sentimental Analysis using EEG Signals

Sentiment analysis using Electroencephalography (EEG) sensor signals provides a deeper behavioral understanding of a person's emotional state, offering insights into real-time mood fluctuations. This approach takes advantage of brain electrical activity, making it a promising tool for various applications, including mental health monitoring, affective computing, and personalised user experiences. An encoder-based model for EEG-to-sentiment analysis, utilizing the ZUCO 2.0 dataset and incorporating a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), is proposed to enhance this process. FPNs are adapted here for EEG sensor data, enabling multiscale feature extraction to capture local and global sentiment-related patterns. The raw EEG sensor data from the ZUCO 2.0 dataset is pre-processed and passed through the FPN, which extracts hierarchical features. In addition, extracted features are passed to a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to model temporal dependencies, thereby enhancing the accuracy of sentiment classification. The ZUCO 2.0 dataset is utilized for its clear and detailed representation in 128 channels, offering rich spatial and temporal resolution. The experimental metric results show that the proposed architecture achieves a 6.88\% performance gain compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, the proposed framework demonstrated its efficacy on the validation datasets DEAP and SEED.

When a Nation Speaks: Machine Learning and NLP in People's Sentiment Analysis During Bangladesh's 2024 Mass Uprising

Sentiment analysis, an emerging research area within natural language processing (NLP), has primarily been explored in contexts like elections and social media trends, but there remains a significant gap in understanding emotional dynamics during civil unrest, particularly in the Bangla language. Our study pioneers sentiment analysis in Bangla during a national crisis by examining public emotions amid Bangladesh's 2024 mass uprising. We curated a unique dataset of 2,028 annotated news headlines from major Facebook news portals, classifying them into Outrage, Hope, and Despair. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we identified prevalent themes like political corruption and public protests, and analyzed how events such as internet blackouts shaped sentiment patterns. It outperformed multilingual transformers (mBERT: 67%, XLM-RoBERTa: 71%) and traditional machine learning methods (SVM and Logistic Regression: both 70%). These results highlight the effectiveness of language-specific models and offer valuable insights into public sentiment during political turmoil.

Local Language Models for Context-Aware Adaptive Anonymization of Sensitive Text

Qualitative research often contains personal, contextual, and organizational details that pose privacy risks if not handled appropriately. Manual anonymization is time-consuming, inconsistent, and frequently omits critical identifiers. Existing automated tools tend to rely on pattern matching or fixed rules, which fail to capture context and may alter the meaning of the data. This study uses local LLMs to build a reliable, repeatable, and context-aware anonymization process for detecting and anonymizing sensitive data in qualitative transcripts. We introduce a Structured Framework for Adaptive Anonymizer (SFAA) that includes three steps: detection, classification, and adaptive anonymization. The SFAA incorporates four anonymization strategies: rule-based substitution, context-aware rewriting, generalization, and suppression. These strategies are applied based on the identifier type and the risk level. The identifiers handled by the SFAA are guided by major international privacy and research ethics standards, including the GDPR, HIPAA, and OECD guidelines. This study followed a dual-method evaluation that combined manual and LLM-assisted processing. Two case studies were used to support the evaluation. The first includes 82 face-to-face interviews on gamification in organizations. The second involves 93 machine-led interviews using an AI-powered interviewer to test LLM awareness and workplace privacy. Two local models, LLaMA and Phi were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The results indicate that the LLMs found more sensitive data than a human reviewer. Phi outperformed LLaMA in finding sensitive data, but made slightly more errors. Phi was able to find over 91% of the sensitive data and 94.8% kept the same sentiment as the original text, which means it was very accurate, hence, it does not affect the analysis of the qualitative data.

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