What About Emotions? Guiding Fine-Grained Emotion Extraction from Mobile App Reviews

Opinion mining plays a vital role in analysing user feedback and extracting insights from textual data. While most research focuses on sentiment polarity (e.g., positive, negative, neutral), fine-grained emotion classification in app reviews remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by identifying and addressing the challenges and limitations in fine-grained emotion analysis in the context of app reviews. Our study adapts Plutchik's emotion taxonomy to app reviews by developing a structured annotation framework and dataset. Through an iterative human annotation process, we define clear annotation guidelines and document key challenges in emotion classification. Additionally, we evaluate the feasibility of automating emotion annotation using large language models, assessing their cost-effectiveness and agreement with human-labelled data. Our findings reveal that while large language models significantly reduce manual effort and maintain substantial agreement with human annotators, full automation remains challenging due to the complexity of emotional interpretation. This work contributes to opinion mining by providing structured guidelines, an annotated dataset, and insights for developing automated pipelines to capture the complexity of emotions in app reviews.

Bitcoin's Edge: Embedded Sentiment in Blockchain Transactional Data

Cryptocurrency blockchains, beyond their primary role as distributed payment systems, are increasingly used to store and share arbitrary content, such as text messages and files. Although often non-financial, this hidden content can impact price movements by conveying private information, shaping sentiment, and influencing public opinion. However, current analyses of such data are limited in scope and scalability, primarily relying on manual classification or hand-crafted heuristics. In this work, we address these limitations by employing Natural Language Processing techniques to analyze, detect patterns, and extract public sentiment encoded within blockchain transactional data. Using a variety of Machine Learning techniques, we showcase for the first time the predictive power of blockchain-embedded sentiment in forecasting cryptocurrency price movements on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. Our findings shed light on a previously underexplored source of freely available, transparent, and immutable data and introduce blockchain sentiment analysis as a novel and robust framework for enhancing financial predictions in cryptocurrency markets. Incidentally, we discover an asymmetry between cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin has an informational advantage over Ethereum in that the sentiment embedded into transactional data is sufficient to predict its price movement.

A Python Tool for Reconstructing Full News Text from GDELT

News data have become an essential resource across various disciplines, including economics, finance, management, social sciences, and computer science. Researchers leverage newspaper articles to study economic trends, market dynamics, corporate strategies, public perception, political discourse, and the evolution of public opinion. Additionally, news datasets have been instrumental in training large-scale language models, with applications in sentiment analysis, fake news detection, and automated news summarization. Despite their significance, access to comprehensive news corpora remains a key challenge. Many full-text news providers, such as Factiva and LexisNexis, require costly subscriptions, while free alternatives often suffer from incomplete data and transparency issues. This paper presents a novel approach to obtaining full-text newspaper articles at near-zero cost by leveraging data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT). Specifically, we focus on the GDELT Web News NGrams 3.0 dataset, which provides high-frequency updates of n-grams extracted from global online news sources. We provide Python code to reconstruct full-text articles from these n-grams by identifying overlapping textual fragments and intelligently merging them. Our method enables researchers to access structured, large-scale newspaper data for text analysis while overcoming the limitations of existing proprietary datasets. The proposed approach enhances the accessibility of news data for empirical research, facilitating applications in economic forecasting, computational social science, and natural language processing.

Emotion-o1: Adaptive Long Reasoning for Emotion Understanding in LLMs

Emotion understanding includes basic tasks (e.g., sentiment/emotion classification) and advanced tasks (e.g., sarcasm/humor detection). Current methods rely on fixed-length CoT reasoning, failing to adapt to the varying complexity of emotions. We propose a task-adaptive reasoning framework that employs DeepSeek-R1 to generate variable-length reasoning chains for different emotion tasks. By combining fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, we design a composite reward function that balances four objectives: prediction accuracy, adaptive reasoning depth control, structural diversity in reasoning paths, and suppression of repetitive logic. This approach achieves dynamic context-sensitive inference while enabling LLMs to autonomously develop deep reasoning capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in both Acc and F1 scores across four tasks: emotion, sentiment, humor, and sarcasm. Notably, peak enhancements reached 3.56% F1 (2.76% Acc) for basic tasks and 37.95% F1 (23.14% Acc) for advanced tasks. Our work bridges rigid CoT reasoning and emotional complexity through adaptive-depth analysis.

Are you SURE? Enhancing Multimodal Pretraining with Missing Modalities through Uncertainty Estimation

Multimodal learning has demonstrated incredible successes by integrating diverse data sources, yet it often relies on the availability of all modalities - an assumption that rarely holds in real-world applications. Pretrained multimodal models, while effective, struggle when confronted with small-scale and incomplete datasets (i.e., missing modalities), limiting their practical applicability. Previous studies on reconstructing missing modalities have overlooked the reconstruction's potential unreliability, which could compromise the quality of the final outputs. We present SURE (Scalable Uncertainty and Reconstruction Estimation), a novel framework that extends the capabilities of pretrained multimodal models by introducing latent space reconstruction and uncertainty estimation for both reconstructed modalities and downstream tasks. Our method is architecture-agnostic, reconstructs missing modalities, and delivers reliable uncertainty estimates, improving both interpretability and performance. SURE introduces a unique Pearson Correlation-based loss and applies statistical error propagation in deep networks for the first time, allowing precise quantification of uncertainties from missing data and model predictions. Extensive experiments across tasks such as sentiment analysis, genre classification, and action recognition show that SURE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, ensuring robust predictions even in the presence of incomplete data.

Examining Linguistic Shifts in Academic Writing Before and After the Launch of ChatGPT: A Study on Preprint Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have prompted academic concerns about their impact on academic writing. Existing studies have primarily examined LLM usage in academic writing through quantitative approaches, such as word frequency statistics and probability-based analyses. However, few have systematically examined the potential impact of LLMs on the linguistic characteristics of academic writing. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale analysis across 823,798 abstracts published in last decade from arXiv dataset. Through the linguistic analysis of features such as the frequency of LLM-preferred words, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, readability and sentiment, the results indicate a significant increase in the proportion of LLM-preferred words in abstracts, revealing the widespread influence of LLMs on academic writing. Additionally, we observed an increase in lexical complexity and sentiment in the abstracts, but a decrease in syntactic complexity, suggesting that LLMs introduce more new vocabulary and simplify sentence structure. However, the significant decrease in cohesion and readability indicates that abstracts have fewer connecting words and are becoming more difficult to read. Moreover, our analysis reveals that scholars with weaker English proficiency were more likely to use the LLMs for academic writing, and focused on improving the overall logic and fluency of the abstracts. Finally, at discipline level, we found that scholars in Computer Science showed more pronounced changes in writing style, while the changes in Mathematics were minimal.

Dynamic Hedging Strategies in Derivatives Markets with LLM-Driven Sentiment and News Analytics

Dynamic hedging strategies are essential for effective risk management in derivatives markets, where volatility and market sentiment can greatly impact performance. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for sentiment analysis and news analytics to inform hedging decisions. By analyzing textual data from diverse sources like news articles, social media, and financial reports, our approach captures critical sentiment indicators that reflect current market conditions. The framework allows for real-time adjustments to hedging strategies, adapting positions based on continuous sentiment signals. Backtesting results on historical derivatives data reveal that our dynamic hedging strategies achieve superior risk-adjusted returns compared to conventional static approaches. The incorporation of LLM-driven sentiment analysis into hedging practices presents a significant advancement in decision-making processes within derivatives trading. This research showcases how sentiment-informed dynamic hedging can enhance portfolio management and effectively mitigate associated risks.

Emotion Alignment: Discovering the Gap Between Social Media and Real-World Sentiments in Persian Tweets and Images

In contemporary society, widespread social media usage is evident in people's daily lives. Nevertheless, disparities in emotional expressions between the real world and online platforms can manifest. We comprehensively analyzed Persian community on X to explore this phenomenon. An innovative pipeline was designed to measure the similarity between emotions in the real world compared to social media. Accordingly, recent tweets and images of participants were gathered and analyzed using Transformers-based text and image sentiment analysis modules. Each participant's friends also provided insights into the their real-world emotions. A distance criterion was used to compare real-world feelings with virtual experiences. Our study encompassed N=105 participants, 393 friends who contributed their perspectives, over 8,300 collected tweets, and 2,000 media images. Results indicated a 28.67% similarity between images and real-world emotions, while tweets exhibited a 75.88% alignment with real-world feelings. Additionally, the statistical significance confirmed that the observed disparities in sentiment proportions.

Exploring Societal Concerns and Perceptions of AI: A Thematic Analysis through the Lens of Problem-Seeking

This study introduces a novel conceptual framework distinguishing problem-seeking from problem-solving to clarify the unique features of human intelligence in contrast to AI. Problem-seeking refers to the embodied, emotionally grounded process by which humans identify and set goals, while problem-solving denotes the execution of strategies aimed at achieving such predefined objectives. The framework emphasizes that while AI excels at efficiency and optimization, it lacks the orientation derived from experiential grounding and the embodiment flexibility intrinsic to human cognition. To empirically explore this distinction, the research analyzes metadata from 157 YouTube videos discussing AI. Conducting a thematic analysis combining qualitative insights with keyword-based quantitative metrics, this mixed-methods approach uncovers recurring themes in public discourse, including privacy, job displacement, misinformation, optimism, and ethical concerns. The results reveal a dual sentiment: public fascination with AI's capabilities coexists with anxiety and skepticism about its societal implications. The discussion critiques the orthogonality thesis, which posits that intelligence is separable from goal content, and instead argues that human intelligence integrates goal-setting and goal-pursuit. It underscores the centrality of embodied cognition in human reasoning and highlights how AI's limitations come from its current reliance on computational processing. The study advocates for enhancing emotional and digital literacy to foster responsible AI engagement. It calls for reframing public discourse to recognize AI as a tool that augments -- rather than replaces -- human intelligence. By positioning problem seeking at the core of cognition and as a critical dimension of intelligence, this research offers new perspectives on ethically aligned and human-centered AI development.

SAE-SSV: Supervised Steering in Sparse Representation Spaces for Reliable Control of Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper introduces a novel supervised steering approach that operates in sparse, interpretable representation spaces. We employ sparse autoencoders (SAEs)to obtain sparse latent representations that aim to disentangle semantic attributes from model activations. Then we train linear classifiers to identify a small subspace of task-relevant dimensions in latent representations. Finally, we learn supervised steering vectors constrained to this subspace, optimized to align with target behaviors. Experiments across sentiment, truthfulness, and politics polarity steering tasks with multiple LLMs demonstrate that our supervised steering vectors achieve higher success rates with minimal degradation in generation quality compared to existing methods. Further analysis reveals that a notably small subspace is sufficient for effective steering, enabling more targeted and interpretable interventions.