DESS: DeBERTa Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Fine-grained sentiment analysis faces ongoing challenges in Aspect Sentiment Triple Extraction (ASTE), particularly in accurately capturing the relationships between aspects, opinions, and sentiment polarities. While researchers have made progress using BERT and Graph Neural Networks, the full potential of advanced language models in understanding complex language patterns remains unexplored. We introduce DESS, a new approach that builds upon previous work by integrating DeBERTa's enhanced attention mechanism to better understand context and relationships in text. Our framework maintains a dual-channel structure, where DeBERTa works alongside an LSTM channel to process both meaning and grammatical patterns in text. We have carefully refined how these components work together, paying special attention to how different types of language information interact. When we tested DESS on standard datasets, it showed meaningful improvements over current methods, with F1-score increases of 4.85, 8.36, and 2.42 in identifying aspect opinion pairs and determining sentiment accurately. Looking deeper into the results, we found that DeBERTa's sophisticated attention system helps DESS handle complicated sentence structures better, especially when important words are far apart. Our findings suggest that upgrading to more advanced language models when thoughtfully integrated, can lead to real improvements in how well we can analyze sentiments in text. The implementation of our approach is publicly available at: https://github.com/VishalRepos/DESS.

OmniMER: Indonesian Multimodal Emotion Recognition via Auxiliary-Enhanced LLM Adaptation

Indonesian, spoken by over 200 million people, remains underserved in multimodal emotion recognition research despite its dominant presence on Southeast Asian social media platforms. We introduce IndoMER, the first multimodal emotion recognition benchmark for Indonesian, comprising 1,944 video segments from 203 speakers with temporally aligned text, audio, and visual annotations across seven emotion categories. The dataset exhibits realistic challenges including cross-modal inconsistency and long-tailed class distributions shaped by Indonesian cultural communication norms. To address these challenges, we propose OmniMER, a multimodal adaptation framework built upon Qwen2.5-Omni that enhances emotion recognition through three auxiliary modality-specific perception tasks: emotion keyword extraction for text, facial expression analysis for video, and prosody analysis for audio. These auxiliary tasks help the model identify emotion-relevant cues in each modality before fusion, reducing reliance on spurious correlations in low-resource settings. Experiments on IndoMER show that OmniMER achieves 0.582 Macro-F1 on sentiment classification and 0.454 on emotion recognition, outperforming the base model by 7.6 and 22.1 absolute points respectively. Cross-lingual evaluation on the Chinese CH-SIMS dataset further demonstrates the generalizability of the proposed framework. The dataset and code are publicly available. https://github.com/yanxm01/INDOMER

LLMs vs. Traditional Sentiment Tools in Psychology: An Evaluation on Belgian-Dutch Narratives

Understanding emotional nuances in everyday language is crucial for computational linguistics and emotion research. While traditional lexicon-based tools like LIWC and Pattern have served as foundational instruments, Large Language Models (LLMs) promise enhanced context understanding. We evaluated three Dutch-specific LLMs (ChocoLlama-8B-Instruct, Reynaerde-7B-chat, and GEITje-7B-ultra) against LIWC and Pattern for valence prediction in Flemish, a low-resource language variant. Our dataset comprised approximately 25000 spontaneous textual responses from 102 Dutch-speaking participants, each providing narratives about their current experiences with self-assessed valence ratings (-50 to +50). Surprisingly, despite architectural advancements, the Dutch-tuned LLMs underperformed compared to traditional methods, with Pattern showing superior performance. These findings challenge assumptions about LLM superiority in sentiment analysis tasks and highlight the complexity of capturing emotional valence in spontaneous, real-world narratives. Our results underscore the need for developing culturally and linguistically tailored evaluation frameworks for low-resource language variants, while questioning whether current LLM fine-tuning approaches adequately address the nuanced emotional expressions found in everyday language use.

Risk-Aware Financial Forecasting Enhanced by Machine Learning and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making

In the face of increasing financial uncertainty and market complexity, this study presents a novel risk-aware financial forecasting framework that integrates advanced machine learning techniques with intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). Tailored to the BIST 100 index and validated through a case study of a major defense company in Türkiye, the framework fuses structured financial data, unstructured text data, and macroeconomic indicators to enhance predictive accuracy and robustness. It incorporates a hybrid suite of models, including extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), long short-term memory (LSTM) network, graph neural network (GNN), to deliver probabilistic forecasts with quantified uncertainty. The empirical results demonstrate high forecasting accuracy, with a net profit mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 3.03% and narrow 95% confidence intervals for key financial indicators. The risk-aware analysis indicates a favorable risk-return profile, with a Sharpe ratio of 1.25 and a higher Sortino ratio of 1.80, suggesting relatively low downside volatility and robust performance under market fluctuations. Sensitivity analysis shows that the key financial indicator predictions are highly sensitive to variations of inflation, interest rates, sentiment, and exchange rates. Additionally, using an intuitionistic fuzzy MCDM approach, combining entropy weighting, evaluation based on distance from the average solution (EDAS), and the measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS) methods, the tabular data learning network (TabNet) outperforms the other models and is identified as the most suitable candidate for deployment. Overall, the findings of this work highlight the importance of integrating advanced machine learning, risk quantification, and fuzzy MCDM methodologies in financial forecasting, particularly in emerging markets.

SynQuE: Estimating Synthetic Dataset Quality Without Annotations

We introduce and formalize the Synthetic Dataset Quality Estimation (SynQuE) problem: ranking synthetic datasets by their expected real-world task performance using only limited unannotated real data. This addresses a critical and open challenge where data is scarce due to collection costs or privacy constraints. We establish the first comprehensive benchmarks for this problem by introducing and evaluating proxy metrics that choose synthetic data for training to maximize task performance on real data. We introduce the first proxy metrics for SynQuE by adapting distribution and diversity-based distance measures to our context via embedding models. To address the shortcomings of these metrics on complex planning tasks, we propose LENS, a novel proxy that leverages large language model reasoning. Our results show that SynQuE proxies correlate with real task performance across diverse tasks, including sentiment analysis, Text2SQL, web navigation, and image classification, with LENS consistently outperforming others on complex tasks by capturing nuanced characteristics. For instance, on text-to-SQL parsing, training on the top-3 synthetic datasets selected via SynQuE proxies can raise accuracy from 30.4% to 38.4 (+8.1)% on average compared to selecting data indiscriminately. This work establishes SynQuE as a practical framework for synthetic data selection under real-data scarcity and motivates future research on foundation model-based data characterization and fine-grained data selection.

Polypersona: Persona-Grounded LLM for Synthetic Survey Responses

This paper introduces PolyPersona, a generative framework for synthesizing persona-conditioned survey responses across multiple domains. The framework instruction-tunes compact chat models using parameter-efficient LoRA adapters with 4-bit quantization under a resource-adaptive training setup. A dialogue-based data pipeline explicitly preserves persona cues, ensuring consistent behavioral alignment across generated responses. Using this pipeline, we construct a dataset of 3,568 synthetic survey responses spanning ten domains and 433 distinct personas, enabling controlled instruction tuning and systematic multi-domain evaluation. We evaluate the generated responses using a multi-metric evaluation suite that combines standard text generation metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE, and BERTScore, with survey-specific metrics designed to assess structural coherence, stylistic consistency, and sentiment alignment.Experimental results show that compact models such as TinyLlama 1.1B and Phi-2 achieve performance comparable to larger 7B to 8B baselines, with a highest BLEU score of 0.090 and ROUGE-1 of 0.429. These findings demonstrate that persona-conditioned fine-tuning enables small language models to generate reliable and coherent synthetic survey data. The proposed framework provides an efficient and reproducible approach for survey data generation, supporting scalable evaluation while facilitating bias analysis through transparent and open protocols.

Extending a Parliamentary Corpus with MPs' Tweets: Automatic Annotation and Evaluation Using MultiParTweet

Social media serves as a critical medium in modern politics because it both reflects politicians' ideologies and facilitates communication with younger generations. We present MultiParTweet, a multilingual tweet corpus from X that connects politicians' social media discourse with German political corpus GerParCor, thereby enabling comparative analyses between online communication and parliamentary debates. MultiParTweet contains 39 546 tweets, including 19 056 media items. Furthermore, we enriched the annotation with nine text-based models and one vision-language model (VLM) to annotate MultiParTweet with emotion, sentiment, and topic annotations. Moreover, the automated annotations are evaluated against a manually annotated subset. MultiParTweet can be reconstructed using our tool, TTLABTweetCrawler, which provides a framework for collecting data from X. To demonstrate a methodological demonstration, we examine whether the models can predict each other using the outputs of the remaining models. In summary, we provide MultiParTweet, a resource integrating automatic text and media-based annotations validated with human annotations, and TTLABTweetCrawler, a general-purpose X data collection tool. Our analysis shows that the models are mutually predictable. In addition, VLM-based annotation were preferred by human annotators, suggesting that multimodal representations align more with human interpretation.

Characterising Behavioural Families and Dynamics of Promotional Twitter Bots via Sequence-Based Modelling

This paper asks whether promotional Twitter/X bots form behavioural families and whether members evolve similarly. We analyse 2,798,672 tweets from 2,615 ground-truth promotional bot accounts (2006-2021), focusing on complete years 2009 to 2020. Each bot is encoded as a sequence of symbolic blocks (``digital DNA'') from seven categorical post-level behavioural features (posting action, URL, media, text duplication, hashtags, emojis, sentiment), preserving temporal order only. Using non-overlapping blocks (k=7), cosine similarity over block-frequency vectors, and hierarchical clustering, we obtain four coherent families: Unique Tweeters, Duplicators with URLs, Content Multipliers, and Informed Contributors. Families share behavioural cores but differ systematically in engagement strategies and life-cycle dynamics (beginning/middle/end). We then model behavioural change as mutations. Within each family we align sequences via multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and label events as insertions, deletions, substitutions, alterations, and identity. This quantifies mutation rates, change-prone blocks/features, and mutation hotspots. Deletions and substitutions dominate, insertions are rare, and mutation profiles differ by family, with hotspots early for some families and dispersed for others. Finally, we test predictive value: bots within the same family share mutations more often than bots across families; closer bots share and propagate mutations more than distant ones; and responses to external triggers (e.g., Christmas, Halloween) follow family-specific, partly predictable patterns. Overall, sequence-based family modelling plus mutation analysis provides a fine-grained account of how promotional bot behaviour adapts over time.

Enhancing Public Speaking Skills in Engineering Students Through AI

This research-to-practice full paper was inspired by the persistent challenge in effective communication among engineering students. Public speaking is a necessary skill for future engineers as they have to communicate technical knowledge with diverse stakeholders. While universities offer courses or workshops, they are unable to offer sustained and personalized training to students. Providing comprehensive feedback on both verbal and non-verbal aspects of public speaking is time-intensive, making consistent and individualized assessment impractical. This study integrates research on verbal and non-verbal cues in public speaking to develop an AI-driven assessment model for engineering students. Our approach combines speech analysis, computer vision, and sentiment detection into a multi-modal AI system that provides assessment and feedback. The model evaluates (1) verbal communication (pitch, loudness, pacing, intonation), (2) non-verbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, posture), and (3) expressive coherence, a novel integration ensuring alignment between speech and body language. Unlike previous systems that assess these aspects separately, our model fuses multiple modalities to deliver personalized, scalable feedback. Preliminary testing demonstrated that our AI-generated feedback was moderately aligned with expert evaluations. Among the state-of-the-art AI models evaluated, all of which were Large Language Models (LLMs), including Gemini and OpenAI models, Gemini Pro emerged as the best-performing, showing the strongest agreement with human annotators. By eliminating reliance on human evaluators, this AI-driven public speaking trainer enables repeated practice, helping students naturally align their speech with body language and emotion, crucial for impactful and professional communication.

AI-Driven Contribution Evaluation and Conflict Resolution: A Framework & Design for Group Workload Investigation

The equitable assessment of individual contribution in teams remains a persistent challenge, where conflict and disparity in workload can result in unfair performance evaluation, often requiring manual intervention - a costly and challenging process. We survey existing tool features and identify a gap in conflict resolution methods and AI integration. To address this, we propose a framework and implementation design for a novel AI-enhanced tool that assists in dispute investigation. The framework organises heterogeneous artefacts - submissions (code, text, media), communications (chat, email), coordination records (meeting logs, tasks), peer assessments, and contextual information - into three dimensions with nine benchmarks: Contribution, Interaction, and Role. Objective measures are normalised, aggregated per dimension, and paired with inequality measures (Gini index) to surface conflict markers. A Large Language Model (LLM) architecture performs validated and contextual analysis over these measures to generate interpretable and transparent advisory judgments. We argue for feasibility under current statutory and institutional policy, and outline practical analytics (sentimental, task fidelity, word/line count, etc.), bias safeguards, limitations, and practical challenges.