Improving Neural Argumentative Stance Classification in Controversial Topics with Emotion-Lexicon Features

Argumentation mining comprises several subtasks, among which stance classification focuses on identifying the standpoint expressed in an argumentative text toward a specific target topic. While arguments-especially about controversial topics-often appeal to emotions, most prior work has not systematically incorporated explicit, fine-grained emotion analysis to improve performance on this task. In particular, prior research on stance classification has predominantly utilized non-argumentative texts and has been restricted to specific domains or topics, limiting generalizability. We work on five datasets from diverse domains encompassing a range of controversial topics and present an approach for expanding the Bias-Corrected NRC Emotion Lexicon using DistilBERT embeddings, which we feed into a Neural Argumentative Stance Classification model. Our method systematically expands the emotion lexicon through contextualized embeddings to identify emotionally charged terms not previously captured in the lexicon. Our expanded NRC lexicon (eNRC) improves over the baseline across all five datasets (up to +6.2 percentage points in F1 score), outperforms the original NRC on four datasets (up to +3.0), and surpasses the LLM-based approach on nearly all corpora. We provide all resources-including eNRC, the adapted corpora, and model architecture-to enable other researchers to build upon our work.

Exa-PSD: a new Persian sentiment analysis dataset on Twitter

Today, Social networks such as Twitter are the most widely used platforms for communication of people. Analyzing this data has useful information to recognize the opinion of people in tweets. Sentiment analysis plays a vital role in NLP, which identifies the opinion of the individuals about a specific topic. Natural language processing in Persian has many challenges despite the adventure of strong language models. The datasets available in Persian are generally in special topics such as products, foods, hotels, etc while users may use ironies, colloquial phrases in social media To overcome these challenges, there is a necessity for having a dataset of Persian sentiment analysis on Twitter. In this paper, we introduce the Exa sentiment analysis Persian dataset, which is collected from Persian tweets. This dataset contains 12,000 tweets, annotated by 5 native Persian taggers. The aforementioned data is labeled in 3 classes: positive, neutral and negative. We present the characteristics and statistics of this dataset and use the pre-trained Pars Bert and Roberta as the base model to evaluate this dataset. Our evaluation reached a 79.87 Macro F-score, which shows the model and data can be adequately valuable for a sentiment analysis system.

KNIGHT: Knowledge Graph-Driven Multiple-Choice Question Generation with Adaptive Hardness Calibration

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), they have become instrumental in applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Yet evaluating these systems remains bottlenecked by the time and cost of building specialized assessment datasets. We introduce KNIGHT, an LLM-based, knowledge-graph-driven framework for generating multiple-choice question (MCQ) datasets from external sources. KNIGHT constructs a topic-specific knowledge graph, a structured and parsimonious summary of entities and relations, that can be reused to generate instructor-controlled difficulty levels, including multi-hop questions, without repeatedly re-feeding the full source text. This knowledge graph acts as a compressed, reusable state, making question generation a cheap read over the graph. We instantiate KNIGHT on Wikipedia/Wikidata while keeping the framework domain- and ontology-agnostic. As a case study, KNIGHT produces six MCQ datasets in History, Biology, and Mathematics. We evaluate quality on five criteria: fluency, unambiguity (single correct answer), topic relevance, option uniqueness, and answerability given the provided sources (as a proxy for hallucination). Results show that KNIGHT enables token- and cost-efficient generation from a reusable graph representation, achieves high quality across these criteria, and yields model rankings aligned with MMLU-style benchmarks, while supporting topic-specific and difficulty-controlled evaluation.

SparkMe: Adaptive Semi-Structured Interviewing for Qualitative Insight Discovery

Qualitative insights from user experiences are critical for informing product and policy decisions, but collecting such data at scale is constrained by the time and availability of experts to conduct semi-structured interviews. Recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) to automate interviewing, yet existing systems lack a principled mechanism for balancing systematic coverage of predefined topics with adaptive exploration, or the ability to pursue follow-ups, deep dives, and emergent themes that arise organically during conversation. In this work, we formulate adaptive semi-structured interviewing as an optimization problem over the interviewer's behavior. We define interview utility as a trade-off between coverage of a predefined interview topic guide, discovery of relevant emergent themes, and interview cost measured by length. Based on this formulation, we introduce SparkMe, a multi-agent LLM interviewer that performs deliberative planning via simulated conversation rollouts to select questions with high expected utility. We evaluate SparkMe through controlled experiments with LLM-based interviewees, showing that it achieves higher interview utility, improving topic guide coverage (+4.7% over the best baseline) and eliciting richer emergent insights while using fewer conversational turns than prior LLM interviewing approaches. We further validate SparkMe in a user study with 70 participants across 7 professions on the impact of AI on their workflows. Domain experts rate SparkMe as producing high-quality adaptive interviews that surface helpful profession-specific insights not captured by prior approaches. The code, datasets, and evaluation protocols for SparkMe are available as open-source at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/SparkMe.

Decoding the Hook: A Multimodal LLM Framework for Analyzing the Hooking Period of Video Ads

Video-based ads are a vital medium for brands to engage consumers, with social media platforms leveraging user data to optimize ad delivery and boost engagement. A crucial but under-explored aspect is the 'hooking period', the first three seconds that capture viewer attention and influence engagement metrics. Analyzing this brief window is challenging due to the multimodal nature of video content, which blends visual, auditory, and textual elements. Traditional methods often miss the nuanced interplay of these components, requiring advanced frameworks for thorough evaluation. This study presents a framework using transformer-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to analyze the hooking period of video ads. It tests two frame sampling strategies, uniform random sampling and key frame selection, to ensure balanced and representative acoustic feature extraction, capturing the full range of design elements. The hooking video is processed by state-of-the-art MLLMs to generate descriptive analyses of the ad's initial impact, which are distilled into coherent topics using BERTopic for high-level abstraction. The framework also integrates features such as audio attributes and aggregated ad targeting information, enriching the feature set for further analysis. Empirical validation on large-scale real-world data from social media platforms demonstrates the efficacy of our framework, revealing correlations between hooking period features and key performance metrics like conversion per investment. The results highlight the practical applicability and predictive power of the approach, offering valuable insights for optimizing video ad strategies. This study advances video ad analysis by providing a scalable methodology for understanding and enhancing the initial moments of video advertisements.

Evaluating Cross-Lingual Classification Approaches Enabling Topic Discovery for Multilingual Social Media Data

Analysing multilingual social media discourse remains a major challenge in natural language processing, particularly when large-scale public debates span across diverse languages. This study investigates how different approaches for cross-lingual text classification can support reliable analysis of global conversations. Using hydrogen energy as a case study, we analyse a decade-long dataset of over nine million tweets in English, Japanese, Hindi, and Korean (2013--2022) for topic discovery. The online keyword-driven data collection results in a significant amount of irrelevant content. We explore four approaches to filter relevant content: (1) translating English annotated data into target languages for building language-specific models for each target language, (2) translating unlabelled data appearing from all languages into English for creating a single model based on English annotations, (3) applying English fine-tuned multilingual transformers directly to each target language data, and (4) a hybrid strategy that combines translated annotations with multilingual training. Each approach is evaluated for its ability to filter hydrogen-related tweets from noisy keyword-based collections. Subsequently, topic modeling is performed to extract dominant themes within the relevant subsets. The results highlight key trade-offs between translation and multilingual approaches, offering actionable insights into optimising cross-lingual pipelines for large-scale social media analysis.

ML-driven detection and reduction of ballast information in multi-modal datasets

Modern datasets often contain ballast as redundant or low-utility information that increases dimensionality, storage requirements, and computational cost without contributing meaningful analytical value. This study introduces a generalized, multimodal framework for ballast detection and reduction across structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and sparse data types. Using diverse datasets, entropy, mutual information, Lasso, SHAP, PCA, topic modelling, and embedding analysis are applied to identify and eliminate ballast features. A novel Ballast Score is proposed to integrate these signals into a unified, cross-modal pruning strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that significant portions of the feature space as often exceeding 70% in sparse or semi-structured data, can be pruned with minimal or even improved classification performance, along with substantial reductions in training time and memory footprint. The framework reveals distinct ballast typologies (e.g. statistical, semantic, infrastructural), and offers practical guidance for leaner, more efficient machine learning pipelines.

PedaCo-Gen: Scaffolding Pedagogical Agency in Human-AI Collaborative Video Authoring

While advancements in Text-to-Video (T2V) generative AI offer a promising path toward democratizing content creation, current models are often optimized for visual fidelity rather than instructional efficacy. This study introduces PedaCo-Gen, a pedagogically-informed human-AI collaborative video generating system for authoring instructional videos based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML). Moving away from traditional "one-shot" generation, PedaCo-Gen introduces an Intermediate Representation (IR) phase, enabling educators to interactively review and refine video blueprints-comprising scripts and visual descriptions-with an AI reviewer. Our study with 23 education experts demonstrates that PedaCo-Gen significantly enhances video quality across various topics and CTML principles compared to baselines. Participants perceived the AI-driven guidance not merely as a set of instructions but as a metacognitive scaffold that augmented their instructional design expertise, reporting high production efficiency (M=4.26) and guide validity (M=4.04). These findings highlight the importance of reclaiming pedagogical agency through principled co-creation, providing a foundation for future AI authoring tools that harmonize generative power with human professional expertise.

DeepVision-103K: A Visually Diverse, Broad-Coverage, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been shown effective in enhancing the visual reflection and reasoning capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, existing datasets are predominantly derived from either small-scale manual construction or recombination of prior resources, which limits data diversity and coverage, thereby constraining further gains in model performance. To this end, we introduce \textbf{DeepVision-103K}, a comprehensive dataset for RLVR training that covers diverse K12 mathematical topics, extensive knowledge points, and rich visual elements. Models trained on DeepVision achieve strong performance on multimodal mathematical benchmarks, and generalize effectively to general multimodal reasoning tasks. Further analysis reveals enhanced visual perception, reflection and reasoning capabilities in trained models, validating DeepVision's effectiveness for advancing multimodal reasoning. Data: \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/skylenage/DeepVision-103K}{this url}.

Analytical Derivation of Quantization Error in Threshold Level Quantizers Using Bipolar PFM

Uniform quantization is a topic that has been extensively studied. However and although an analytical description of quantization noise has been proposed, most descriptions of the spectral properties of quantization error resort to statistical descriptions. In this paper, we show how the spectrum of a quantized signal can be expressed using pulse frequency modulation. We first establish the equivalence of a uniform quantizer with a system based on the bipolar pulse frequency modulation and we define afterwards the Fourier transform of the quantized signal using pulse frequency modulation properties. This model brings a more intuitive understanding of the spectral structure of quantization noise and complements prior research in the topic. The results of the paper can be directly applied to level crossing ADCs with zero-order-hold interpolators, giving an accurate estimation of their performance.