Do Multimodal LLMs See Sentiment?

Understanding how visual content communicates sentiment is critical in an era where online interaction is increasingly dominated by this kind of media on social platforms. However, this remains a challenging problem, as sentiment perception is closely tied to complex, scene-level semantics. In this paper, we propose an original framework, MLLMsent, to investigate the sentiment reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) through three perspectives: (1) using those MLLMs for direct sentiment classification from images; (2) associating them with pre-trained LLMs for sentiment analysis on automatically generated image descriptions; and (3) fine-tuning the LLMs on sentiment-labeled image descriptions. Experiments on a recent and established benchmark demonstrate that our proposal, particularly the fine-tuned approach, achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming Lexicon-, CNN-, and Transformer-based baselines by up to 30.9%, 64.8%, and 42.4%, respectively, across different levels of evaluators' agreement and sentiment polarity categories. Remarkably, in a cross-dataset test, without any training on these new data, our model still outperforms, by up to 8.26%, the best runner-up, which has been trained directly on them. These results highlight the potential of the proposed visual reasoning scheme for advancing affective computing, while also establishing new benchmarks for future research.

Continuous sentiment scores for literary and multilingual contexts

Sentiment Analysis is widely used to quantify sentiment in text, but its application to literary texts poses unique challenges due to figurative language, stylistic ambiguity, as well as sentiment evocation strategies. Traditional dictionary-based tools often underperform, especially for low-resource languages, and transformer models, while promising, typically output coarse categorical labels that limit fine-grained analysis. We introduce a novel continuous sentiment scoring method based on concept vector projection, trained on multilingual literary data, which more effectively captures nuanced sentiment expressions across genres, languages, and historical periods. Our approach outperforms existing tools on English and Danish texts, producing sentiment scores whose distribution closely matches human ratings, enabling more accurate analysis and sentiment arc modeling in literature.

The Sound of Risk: A Multimodal Physics-Informed Acoustic Model for Forecasting Market Volatility and Enhancing Market Interpretability

Information asymmetry in financial markets, often amplified by strategically crafted corporate narratives, undermines the effectiveness of conventional textual analysis. We propose a novel multimodal framework for financial risk assessment that integrates textual sentiment with paralinguistic cues derived from executive vocal tract dynamics in earnings calls. Central to this framework is the Physics-Informed Acoustic Model (PIAM), which applies nonlinear acoustics to robustly extract emotional signatures from raw teleconference sound subject to distortions such as signal clipping. Both acoustic and textual emotional states are projected onto an interpretable three-dimensional Affective State Label (ASL) space-Tension, Stability, and Arousal. Using a dataset of 1,795 earnings calls (approximately 1,800 hours), we construct features capturing dynamic shifts in executive affect between scripted presentation and spontaneous Q&A exchanges. Our key finding reveals a pronounced divergence in predictive capacity: while multimodal features do not forecast directional stock returns, they explain up to 43.8% of the out-of-sample variance in 30-day realized volatility. Importantly, volatility predictions are strongly driven by emotional dynamics during executive transitions from scripted to spontaneous speech, particularly reduced textual stability and heightened acoustic instability from CFOs, and significant arousal variability from CEOs. An ablation study confirms that our multimodal approach substantially outperforms a financials-only baseline, underscoring the complementary contributions of acoustic and textual modalities. By decoding latent markers of uncertainty from verifiable biometric signals, our methodology provides investors and regulators a powerful tool for enhancing market interpretability and identifying hidden corporate uncertainty.

The Promise of Large Language Models in Digital Health: Evidence from Sentiment Analysis in Online Health Communities

Digital health analytics face critical challenges nowadays. The sophisticated analysis of patient-generated health content, which contains complex emotional and medical contexts, requires scarce domain expertise, while traditional ML approaches are constrained by data shortage and privacy limitations in healthcare settings. Online Health Communities (OHCs) exemplify these challenges with mixed-sentiment posts, clinical terminology, and implicit emotional expressions that demand specialised knowledge for accurate Sentiment Analysis (SA). To address these challenges, this study explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can integrate expert knowledge through in-context learning for SA, providing a scalable solution for sophisticated health data analysis. Specifically, we develop a structured codebook that systematically encodes expert interpretation guidelines, enabling LLMs to apply domain-specific knowledge through targeted prompting rather than extensive training. Six GPT models validated alongside DeepSeek and LLaMA 3.1 are compared with pre-trained language models (BioBERT variants) and lexicon-based methods, using 400 expert-annotated posts from two OHCs. LLMs achieve superior performance while demonstrating expert-level agreement. This high agreement, with no statistically significant difference from inter-expert agreement levels, suggests knowledge integration beyond surface-level pattern recognition. The consistent performance across diverse LLM models, supported by in-context learning, offers a promising solution for digital health analytics. This approach addresses the critical challenge of expert knowledge shortage in digital health research, enabling real-time, expert-quality analysis for patient monitoring, intervention assessment, and evidence-based health strategies.

Arabic Multimodal Machine Learning: Datasets, Applications, Approaches, and Challenges

Multimodal Machine Learning (MML) aims to integrate and analyze information from diverse modalities, such as text, audio, and visuals, enabling machines to address complex tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, and multimedia retrieval. Recently, Arabic MML has reached a certain level of maturity in its foundational development, making it time to conduct a comprehensive survey. This paper explores Arabic MML by categorizing efforts through a novel taxonomy and analyzing existing research. Our taxonomy organizes these efforts into four key topics: datasets, applications, approaches, and challenges. By providing a structured overview, this survey offers insights into the current state of Arabic MML, highlighting areas that have not been investigated and critical research gaps. Researchers will be empowered to build upon the identified opportunities and address challenges to advance the field.

Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling

World models have been widely utilized in robotics, gaming, and auto-driving. However, their applications on natural language tasks are relatively limited. In this paper, we construct the dialogue world model, which could predict the user's emotion, sentiment, and intention, and future utterances. By defining a POMDP, we argue emotion, sentiment and intention can be modeled as the user belief and solved by maximizing the information bottleneck. By this user belief modeling, we apply the model-based reinforcement learning framework to the dialogue system, and propose a framework called DreamCUB. Experiments show that the pretrained dialogue world model can achieve state-of-the-art performances on emotion classification and sentiment identification, while dialogue quality is also enhanced by joint training of the policy, critic and dialogue world model. Further analysis shows that this manner holds a reasonable exploration-exploitation balance and also transfers well to out-of-domain scenarios such as empathetic dialogues.

Advancing Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with LLMs and Constrained Decoding for Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has made significant strides, yet challenges remain for low-resource languages due to the predominant focus on English. Current cross-lingual ABSA studies often centre on simpler tasks and rely heavily on external translation tools. In this paper, we present a novel sequence-to-sequence method for compound ABSA tasks that eliminates the need for such tools. Our approach, which uses constrained decoding, improves cross-lingual ABSA performance by up to 10\%. This method broadens the scope of cross-lingual ABSA, enabling it to handle more complex tasks and providing a practical, efficient alternative to translation-dependent techniques. Furthermore, we compare our approach with large language models (LLMs) and show that while fine-tuned multilingual LLMs can achieve comparable results, English-centric LLMs struggle with these tasks.

Prompt-Based Approach for Czech Sentiment Analysis

This paper introduces the first prompt-based methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis and sentiment classification in Czech. We employ the sequence-to-sequence models to solve the aspect-based tasks simultaneously and demonstrate the superiority of our prompt-based approach over traditional fine-tuning. In addition, we conduct zero-shot and few-shot learning experiments for sentiment classification and show that prompting yields significantly better results with limited training examples compared to traditional fine-tuning. We also demonstrate that pre-training on data from the target domain can lead to significant improvements in a zero-shot scenario.

Improving Generative Cross-lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Constrained Decoding

While aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has made substantial progress, challenges remain for low-resource languages, which are often overlooked in favour of English. Current cross-lingual ABSA approaches focus on limited, less complex tasks and often rely on external translation tools. This paper introduces a novel approach using constrained decoding with sequence-to-sequence models, eliminating the need for unreliable translation tools and improving cross-lingual performance by 5\% on average for the most complex task. The proposed method also supports multi-tasking, which enables solving multiple ABSA tasks with a single model, with constrained decoding boosting results by more than 10\%. We evaluate our approach across seven languages and six ABSA tasks, surpassing state-of-the-art methods and setting new benchmarks for previously unexplored tasks. Additionally, we assess large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. While LLMs perform poorly in zero-shot and few-shot settings, fine-tuning achieves competitive results compared to smaller multilingual models, albeit at the cost of longer training and inference times. We provide practical recommendations for real-world applications, enhancing the understanding of cross-lingual ABSA methodologies. This study offers valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of cross-lingual ABSA approaches, advancing the state-of-the-art in this challenging research domain.

LLaMA-Based Models for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

While large language models (LLMs) show promise for various tasks, their performance in compound aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks lags behind fine-tuned models. However, the potential of LLMs fine-tuned for ABSA remains unexplored. This paper examines the capabilities of open-source LLMs fine-tuned for ABSA, focusing on LLaMA-based models. We evaluate the performance across four tasks and eight English datasets, finding that the fine-tuned Orca~2 model surpasses state-of-the-art results in all tasks. However, all models struggle in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios compared to fully fine-tuned ones. Additionally, we conduct error analysis to identify challenges faced by fine-tuned models.