Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FGSA) aims to identify sentiment polarity toward specific aspects within a text, enabling more precise opinion mining in domains such as product reviews and social media. However, traditional FGSA approaches often require task-specific architectures and extensive annotated data, limiting their generalization and scalability. To address these challenges, we propose PL-FGSA, a unified prompt learning-based framework implemented using the MindSpore platform, which integrates prompt design with a lightweight TextCNN backbone. Our method reformulates FGSA as a multi-task prompt-augmented generation problem, jointly tackling aspect extraction, sentiment classification, and causal explanation in a unified paradigm. By leveraging prompt-based guidance, PL-FGSA enhances interpretability and achieves strong performance under both full-data and low-resource conditions. Experiments on three benchmark datasets-SST-2, SemEval-2014 Task 4, and MAMS-demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods and achieves F1-scores of 0.922, 0.694, and 0.597, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of prompt-based generalization and highlight the practical value of PL-FGSA for real-world sentiment analysis tasks.
We present PersonaConvBench, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating personalized reasoning and generation in multi-turn conversations with large language models (LLMs). Unlike existing work that focuses on either personalization or conversational structure in isolation, PersonaConvBench integrates both, offering three core tasks: sentence classification, impact regression, and user-centric text generation across ten diverse Reddit-based domains. This design enables systematic analysis of how personalized conversational context shapes LLM outputs in realistic multi-user scenarios. We benchmark several commercial and open-source LLMs under a unified prompting setup and observe that incorporating personalized history yields substantial performance improvements, including a 198 percent relative gain over the best non-conversational baseline in sentiment classification. By releasing PersonaConvBench with evaluations and code, we aim to support research on LLMs that adapt to individual styles, track long-term context, and produce contextually rich, engaging responses.
Despite the many benefits of large language models (LLMs), they can also cause harm, e.g., through automatic generation of misinformation, including conspiracy theories. Moreover, LLMs can also ''disguise'' conspiracy theories by altering characteristic textual features, e.g., by transforming their typically strong negative emotions into a more positive tone. Although several studies have proposed automated conspiracy theory detection methods, they are usually trained using human-authored text, whose features can vary from LLM-generated text. Furthermore, several conspiracy detection models, including the previously proposed ConspEmoLLM, rely heavily on the typical emotional features of human-authored conspiracy content. As such, intentionally disguised content may evade detection. To combat such issues, we firstly developed an augmented version of the ConDID conspiracy detection dataset, ConDID-v2, which supplements human-authored conspiracy tweets with versions rewritten by an LLM to reduce the negativity of their original sentiment. The quality of the rewritten tweets was verified by combining human and LLM-based assessment. We subsequently used ConDID-v2 to train ConspEmoLLM-v2, an enhanced version of ConspEmoLLM. Experimental results demonstrate that ConspEmoLLM-v2 retains or exceeds the performance of ConspEmoLLM on the original human-authored content in ConDID, and considerably outperforms both ConspEmoLLM and several other baselines when applied to sentiment-transformed tweets in ConDID-v2. The project will be available at https://github.com/lzw108/ConspEmoLLM.
Multi-task learning (MTL) enables the efficient transfer of extra knowledge acquired from other tasks. The high correlation between multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and multimodal emotion recognition (MER) supports their joint training. However, existing methods primarily employ hard parameter sharing, ignoring parameter conflicts caused by complex task correlations. In this paper, we present a novel MTL method for MSA and MER, termed Multimodal Mixture of Low-Rank Experts (MMoLRE). MMoLRE utilizes shared and task-specific experts to distinctly model common and unique task characteristics, thereby avoiding parameter conflicts. Additionally, inspired by low-rank structures in the Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework, we design low-rank expert networks to reduce parameter and computational overhead as the number of experts increases. Extensive experiments on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI benchmarks demonstrate that MMoLRE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MSA task and competitive results on the MER task.
We propose a new interpretability method for neural networks, which is based on a novel mathematico-philosophical theory of reasons. Our method computes a vector for each neuron, called its reasons vector. We then can compute how strongly this reasons vector speaks for various propositions, e.g., the proposition that the input image depicts digit 2 or that the input prompt has a negative sentiment. This yields an interpretation of neurons, and groups thereof, that combines a logical and a Bayesian perspective, and accounts for polysemanticity (i.e., that a single neuron can figure in multiple concepts). We show, both theoretically and empirically, that this method is: (1) grounded in a philosophically established notion of explanation, (2) uniform, i.e., applies to the common neural network architectures and modalities, (3) scalable, since computing reason vectors only involves forward-passes in the neural network, (4) faithful, i.e., intervening on a neuron based on its reason vector leads to expected changes in model output, (5) correct in that the model's reasons structure matches that of the data source, (6) trainable, i.e., neural networks can be trained to improve their reason strengths, (7) useful, i.e., it delivers on the needs for interpretability by increasing, e.g., robustness and fairness.
Unlike spoken languages where the use of prosodic features to convey emotion is well studied, indicators of emotion in sign language remain poorly understood, creating communication barriers in critical settings. Sign languages present unique challenges as facial expressions and hand movements simultaneously serve both grammatical and emotional functions. To address this gap, we introduce EmoSign, the first sign video dataset containing sentiment and emotion labels for 200 American Sign Language (ASL) videos. We also collect open-ended descriptions of emotion cues. Annotations were done by 3 Deaf ASL signers with professional interpretation experience. Alongside the annotations, we include baseline models for sentiment and emotion classification. This dataset not only addresses a critical gap in existing sign language research but also establishes a new benchmark for understanding model capabilities in multimodal emotion recognition for sign languages. The dataset is made available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/catfang/emosign.
The use of audio recordings of human speech to train LLMs poses privacy concerns due to these models' potential to generate outputs that closely resemble artifacts in the training data. In this study, we propose a speaker privacy-preserving representation learning method through the Universal Speech Codec (USC), a computationally efficient encoder-decoder model that disentangles speech into: $\textit{(i)}$ privacy-preserving semantically rich representations, capturing content and speech paralinguistics, and $\textit{(ii)}$ residual acoustic and speaker representations that enables high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive evaluations presented show that USC's semantic representation preserves content, prosody, and sentiment, while removing potentially identifiable speaker attributes. Combining both representations, USC achieves state-of-the-art speech reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation methodology for measuring privacy-preserving properties, aligning with perceptual tests. We compare USC against other codecs in the literature and demonstrate its effectiveness on privacy-preserving representation learning, illustrating the trade-offs of speaker anonymization, paralinguistics retention and content preservation in the learned semantic representations. Audio samples are shared in $\href{https://www.amazon.science/usc-samples}{https://www.amazon.science/usc-samples}$.
Aligning language models with user intent is becoming increasingly relevant to enhance user experience. This calls for designing methods that can allow users to control the properties of the language that LMs generate. For example, controlling the length of the generation, the complexity of the language that gets chosen, the sentiment, tone, etc. Most existing work attempts to integrate users' control by conditioning LM generations on natural language prompts or discrete control signals, which are often brittle and hard to scale. In this work, we are interested in \textit{continuous} control signals, ones that exist along a spectrum that can't easily be captured in a natural language prompt or via existing techniques in conditional generation. Through a case study in controlling the precise response-length of generations produced by LMs, we demonstrate how after fine-tuning, behaviors of language models can be controlled via continuous signals -- as vectors that are interpolated between a "low" and a "high" token embedding. Our method more reliably exerts response-length control than in-context learning methods or fine-tuning methods that represent the control signal as a discrete signal. Our full open-sourced code and datasets are available at https://github.com/vsamuel2003/CIE.
Classical Chinese poetry is a vital and enduring part of Chinese literature, conveying profound emotional resonance. Existing studies analyze sentiment based on textual meanings, overlooking the unique rhythmic and visual features inherent in poetry,especially since it is often recited and accompanied by Chinese paintings. In this work, we propose a dialect-enhanced multimodal framework for classical Chinese poetry sentiment analysis. We extract sentence-level audio features from the poetry and incorporate audio from multiple dialects,which may retain regional ancient Chinese phonetic features, enriching the phonetic representation. Additionally, we generate sentence-level visual features, and the multimodal features are fused with textual features enhanced by LLM translation through multimodal contrastive representation learning. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets, achieving at least 2.51% improvement in accuracy and 1.63% in macro F1. We open-source the code to facilitate research in this area and provide insights for general multimodal Chinese representation.
Understanding people's preferences and needs is crucial for urban planning decisions, yet current approaches often combine them from multi-cultural and multi-city populations, obscuring important demographic differences and risking amplifying biases. We conducted a large-scale urban visual perception survey of streetscapes worldwide using street view imagery, examining how demographics -- including gender, age, income, education, race and ethnicity, and, for the first time, personality traits -- shape perceptions among 1,000 participants, with balanced demographics, from five countries and 45 nationalities. This dataset, introduced as Street Perception Evaluation Considering Socioeconomics (SPECS), exhibits statistically significant differences in perception scores in six traditionally used indicators (safe, lively, wealthy, beautiful, boring, and depressing) and four new ones we propose (live nearby, walk, cycle, green) among demographics and personalities. We revealed that location-based sentiments are carried over in people's preferences when comparing urban streetscapes with other cities. Further, we compared the perception scores based on where participants and streetscapes are from. We found that an off-the-shelf machine learning model trained on an existing global perception dataset tends to overestimate positive indicators and underestimate negative ones compared to human responses, suggesting that targeted intervention should consider locals' perception. Our study aspires to rectify the myopic treatment of street perception, which rarely considers demographics or personality traits.