Hybrid Emotion Recognition: Enhancing Customer Interactions Through Acoustic and Textual Analysis

This research presents a hybrid emotion recognition system integrating advanced Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze audio and textual data for enhancing customer interactions in contact centers. By combining acoustic features with textual sentiment analysis, the system achieves nuanced emotion detection, addressing the limitations of traditional approaches in understanding complex emotional states. Leveraging LSTM and CNN models for audio analysis and DistilBERT for textual evaluation, the methodology accommodates linguistic and cultural variations while ensuring real-time processing. Rigorous testing on diverse datasets demonstrates the system's robustness and accuracy, highlighting its potential to transform customer service by enabling personalized, empathetic interactions and improving operational efficiency. This research establishes a foundation for more intelligent and human-centric digital communication, redefining customer service standards.

On VLMs for Diverse Tasks in Multimodal Meme Classification

In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic analysis of vision-language models (VLMs) for disparate meme classification tasks. We introduced a novel approach that generates a VLM-based understanding of meme images and fine-tunes the LLMs on textual understanding of the embedded meme text for improving the performance. Our contributions are threefold: (1) Benchmarking VLMs with diverse prompting strategies purposely to each sub-task; (2) Evaluating LoRA fine-tuning across all VLM components to assess performance gains; and (3) Proposing a novel approach where detailed meme interpretations generated by VLMs are used to train smaller language models (LLMs), significantly improving classification. The strategy of combining VLMs with LLMs improved the baseline performance by 8.34%, 3.52% and 26.24% for sarcasm, offensive and sentiment classification, respectively. Our results reveal the strengths and limitations of VLMs and present a novel strategy for meme understanding.

CPR: Leveraging LLMs for Topic and Phrase Suggestion to Facilitate Comprehensive Product Reviews

Consumers often heavily rely on online product reviews, analyzing both quantitative ratings and textual descriptions to assess product quality. However, existing research hasn't adequately addressed how to systematically encourage the creation of comprehensive reviews that capture both customers sentiment and detailed product feature analysis. This paper presents CPR, a novel methodology that leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Topic Modeling to guide users in crafting insightful and well-rounded reviews. Our approach employs a three-stage process: first, we present users with product-specific terms for rating; second, we generate targeted phrase suggestions based on these ratings; and third, we integrate user-written text through topic modeling, ensuring all key aspects are addressed. We evaluate CPR using text-to-text LLMs, comparing its performance against real-world customer reviews from Walmart. Our results demonstrate that CPR effectively identifies relevant product terms, even for new products lacking prior reviews, and provides sentiment-aligned phrase suggestions, saving users time and enhancing reviews quality. Quantitative analysis reveals a 12.3% improvement in BLEU score over baseline methods, further supported by manual evaluation of generated phrases. We conclude by discussing potential extensions and future research directions.

Enhancing Negation Awareness in Universal Text Embeddings: A Data-efficient and Computational-efficient Approach

Negation plays an important role in various natural language processing tasks such as Natural Language Inference and Sentiment Analysis tasks. Numerous prior studies have found that contextual text embedding models such as BERT, ELMO, RoBERTa or XLNet face challenges in accurately understanding negation. Recent advancements in universal text embeddings have demonstrated superior performance over contextual text embeddings in various tasks. However, due to the bias in popular evaluation benchmarks, the negation awareness capacity of these models remains unclear. To bridge the gap in existing literature, an in-depth analysis is initiated in this work to study the negation awareness of cutting-edge universal text embedding models. Our findings reveal a significant lack of negation awareness in these models, often interpreting negated text pairs as semantically similar. To efficiently deal with the conflict that different tasks need different trade-offs between topic and negation information among other semantic information, a data-efficient and computational-efficient embedding re-weighting method is proposed without modifying the parameters of text embedding models. The proposed solution is able to improve text embedding models' negation awareness significantly on both simple negation understanding task and complex negation understanding task. Furthermore, the proposed solution can also significantly improve the negation awareness of Large Language Model based task-specific high dimensional universal text embeddings.

A thorough benchmark of automatic text classification: From traditional approaches to large language models

Automatic text classification (ATC) has experienced remarkable advancements in the past decade, best exemplified by recent small and large language models (SLMs and LLMs), leveraged by Transformer architectures. Despite recent effectiveness improvements, a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis investigating whether the effectiveness gains of these recent approaches compensate their much higher costs when compared to more traditional text classification approaches such as SVMs and Logistic Regression is still missing in the literature. In this context, this work's main contributions are twofold: (i) we provide a scientifically sound comparative analysis of the cost-benefit of twelve traditional and recent ATC solutions including five open LLMs, and (ii) a large benchmark comprising {22 datasets}, including sentiment analysis and topic classification, with their (train-validation-test) partitions based on folded cross-validation procedures, along with documentation, and code. The release of code, data, and documentation enables the community to replicate experiments and advance the field in a more scientifically sound manner. Our comparative experimental results indicate that LLMs outperform traditional approaches (up to 26%-7.1% on average) and SLMs (up to 4.9%-1.9% on average) in terms of effectiveness. However, LLMs incur significantly higher computational costs due to fine-tuning, being, on average 590x and 8.5x slower than traditional methods and SLMs, respectively. Results suggests the following recommendations: (1) LLMs for applications that require the best possible effectiveness and can afford the costs; (2) traditional methods such as Logistic Regression and SVM for resource-limited applications or those that cannot afford the cost of tuning large LLMs; and (3) SLMs like Roberta for near-optimal effectiveness-efficiency trade-off.

Evaluate Bias without Manual Test Sets: A Concept Representation Perspective for LLMs

Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly undermines their reliability and fairness. We focus on a common form of bias: when two reference concepts in the model's concept space, such as sentiment polarities (e.g., "positive" and "negative"), are asymmetrically correlated with a third, target concept, such as a reviewing aspect, the model exhibits unintended bias. For instance, the understanding of "food" should not skew toward any particular sentiment. Existing bias evaluation methods assess behavioral differences of LLMs by constructing labeled data for different social groups and measuring model responses across them, a process that requires substantial human effort and captures only a limited set of social concepts. To overcome these limitations, we propose BiasLens, a test-set-free bias analysis framework based on the structure of the model's vector space. BiasLens combines Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable concept representations, and quantifies bias by measuring the variation in representational similarity between the target concept and each of the reference concepts. Even without labeled data, BiasLens shows strong agreement with traditional bias evaluation metrics (Spearman correlation r > 0.85). Moreover, BiasLens reveals forms of bias that are difficult to detect using existing methods. For example, in simulated clinical scenarios, a patient's insurance status can cause the LLM to produce biased diagnostic assessments. Overall, BiasLens offers a scalable, interpretable, and efficient paradigm for bias discovery, paving the way for improving fairness and transparency in LLMs.

Ethereum Price Prediction Employing Large Language Models for Short-term and Few-shot Forecasting

Cryptocurrencies have transformed financial markets with their innovative blockchain technology and volatile price movements, presenting both challenges and opportunities for predictive analytics. Ethereum, being one of the leading cryptocurrencies, has experienced significant market fluctuations, making its price prediction an attractive yet complex problem. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in predicting Ethereum prices for short-term and few-shot forecasting scenarios. The main challenge in training models for time series analysis is the lack of data. We address this by leveraging a novel approach that adapts existing pre-trained LLMs on natural language or images from billions of tokens to the unique characteristics of Ethereum price time series data. Through thorough experimentation and comparison with traditional and contemporary models, our results demonstrate that selectively freezing certain layers of pre-trained LLMs achieves state-of-the-art performance in this domain. This approach consistently surpasses benchmarks across multiple metrics, including Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. Our research not only contributes to the existing body of knowledge on LLMs but also provides practical insights in the cryptocurrency prediction domain. The adaptability of pre-trained LLMs to handle the nature of Ethereum prices suggests a promising direction for future research, potentially including the integration of sentiment analysis to further refine forecasting accuracy.

Analyzing Patterns and Influence of Advertising in Print Newspapers

This paper investigates advertising practices in print newspapers across India using a novel data-driven approach. We develop a pipeline employing image processing and OCR techniques to extract articles and advertisements from digital versions of print newspapers with high accuracy. Applying this methodology to five popular newspapers that span multiple regions and three languages, English, Hindi, and Telugu, we assembled a dataset of more than 12,000 editions containing several hundred thousand advertisements. Collectively, these newspapers reach a readership of over 100 million people. Using this extensive dataset, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to answer key questions about print advertising: who advertises, what they advertise, when they advertise, where they place their ads, and how they advertise. Our findings reveal significant patterns, including the consistent level of print advertising over the past six years despite declining print circulation, the overrepresentation of company ads on prominent pages, and the disproportionate revenue contributed by government ads. Furthermore, we examine whether advertising in a newspaper influences the coverage an advertiser receives. Through regression analyses on coverage volume and sentiment, we find strong evidence supporting this hypothesis for corporate advertisers. The results indicate a clear trend where increased advertising correlates with more favorable and extensive media coverage, a relationship that remains robust over time and across different levels of advertiser popularity.

Emotion Detection in Twitter Messages Using Combination of Long Short-Term Memory and Convolutional Deep Neural Networks

One of the most significant issues as attended a lot in recent years is that of recognizing the sentiments and emotions in social media texts. The analysis of sentiments and emotions is intended to recognize the conceptual information such as the opinions, feelings, attitudes and emotions of people towards the products, services, organizations, people, topics, events and features in the written text. These indicate the greatness of the problem space. In the real world, businesses and organizations are always looking for tools to gather ideas, emotions, and directions of people about their products, services, or events related to their own. This article uses the Twitter social network, one of the most popular social networks with about 420 million active users, to extract data. Using this social network, users can share their information and opinions about personal issues, policies, products, events, etc. It can be used with appropriate classification of emotional states due to the availability of its data. In this study, supervised learning and deep neural network algorithms are used to classify the emotional states of Twitter users. The use of deep learning methods to increase the learning capacity of the model is an advantage due to the large amount of available data. Tweets collected on various topics are classified into four classes using a combination of two Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory network and a Convolutional network. The results obtained from this study with an average accuracy of 93%, show good results extracted from the proposed framework and improved accuracy compared to previous work.

Emotion Classification In-Context in Spanish

Classifying customer feedback into distinct emotion categories is essential for understanding sentiment and improving customer experience. In this paper, we classify customer feedback in Spanish into three emotion categories--positive, neutral, and negative--using advanced NLP and ML techniques. Traditional methods translate feedback from widely spoken languages to less common ones, resulting in a loss of semantic integrity and contextual nuances inherent to the original language. To address this limitation, we propose a hybrid approach that combines TF-IDF with BERT embeddings, effectively transforming Spanish text into rich numerical representations that preserve the semantic depth of the original language by using a Custom Stacking Ensemble (CSE) approach. To evaluate emotion classification, we utilize a range of models, including Logistic Regression, KNN, Bagging classifier with LGBM, and AdaBoost. The CSE model combines these classifiers as base models and uses a one-vs-all Logistic Regression as the meta-model. Our experimental results demonstrate that CSE significantly outperforms the individual and BERT model, achieving a test accuracy of 93.3% on the native Spanish dataset--higher than the accuracy obtained from the translated version. These findings underscore the challenges of emotion classification in Spanish and highlight the advantages of combining vectorization techniques like TF-IDF with BERT for improved accuracy. Our results provide valuable insights for businesses seeking to leverage emotion classification to enhance customer feedback analysis and service improvements.