FCKT: Fine-Grained Cross-Task Knowledge Transfer with Semantic Contrastive Learning for Targeted Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we address the task of targeted sentiment analysis (TSA), which involves two sub-tasks, i.e., identifying specific aspects from reviews and determining their corresponding sentiments. Aspect extraction forms the foundation for sentiment prediction, highlighting the critical dependency between these two tasks for effective cross-task knowledge transfer. While most existing studies adopt a multi-task learning paradigm to align task-specific features in the latent space, they predominantly rely on coarse-grained knowledge transfer. Such approaches lack fine-grained control over aspect-sentiment relationships, often assuming uniform sentiment polarity within related aspects. This oversimplification neglects contextual cues that differentiate sentiments, leading to negative transfer. To overcome these limitations, we propose FCKT, a fine-grained cross-task knowledge transfer framework tailored for TSA. By explicitly incorporating aspect-level information into sentiment prediction, FCKT achieves fine-grained knowledge transfer, effectively mitigating negative transfer and enhancing task performance. Experiments on three datasets, including comparisons with various baselines and large language models (LLMs), demonstrate the effectiveness of FCKT. The source code is available on https://github.com/cwei01/FCKT.

MMAFFBen: A Multilingual and Multimodal Affective Analysis Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs and VLMs

Large language models and vision-language models (which we jointly call LMs) have transformed NLP and CV, demonstrating remarkable potential across various fields. However, their capabilities in affective analysis (i.e. sentiment analysis and emotion detection) remain underexplored. This gap is largely due to the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, and the inherent complexity of affective analysis tasks. In this paper, we introduce MMAFFBen, the first extensive open-source benchmark for multilingual multimodal affective analysis. MMAFFBen encompasses text, image, and video modalities across 35 languages, covering four key affective analysis tasks: sentiment polarity, sentiment intensity, emotion classification, and emotion intensity. Moreover, we construct the MMAFFIn dataset for fine-tuning LMs on affective analysis tasks, and further develop MMAFFLM-3b and MMAFFLM-7b based on it. We evaluate various representative LMs, including GPT-4o-mini, providing a systematic comparison of their affective understanding capabilities. This project is available at https://github.com/lzw108/MMAFFBen.

Predicting Human Depression with Hybrid Data Acquisition utilizing Physical Activity Sensing and Social Media Feeds

Mental disorders including depression, anxiety, and other neurological disorders pose a significant global challenge, particularly among individuals exhibiting social avoidance tendencies. This study proposes a hybrid approach by leveraging smartphone sensor data measuring daily physical activities and analyzing their social media (Twitter) interactions for evaluating an individual's depression level. Using CNN-based deep learning models and Naive Bayes classification, we identify human physical activities accurately and also classify the user sentiments. A total of 33 participants were recruited for data acquisition, and nine relevant features were extracted from the physical activities and analyzed with their weekly depression scores, evaluated using the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) questionnaire. Of the nine features, six are derived from physical activities, achieving an activity recognition accuracy of 95%, while three features stem from sentiment analysis of Twitter activities, yielding a sentiment analysis accuracy of 95.6%. Notably, several physical activity features exhibited significant correlations with the severity of depression symptoms. For classifying the depression severity, a support vector machine (SVM)-based algorithm is employed that demonstrated a very high accuracy of 94%, outperforming alternative models, e.g., the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and k-nearest neighbor. It is a simple approach yet highly effective in the long run for monitoring depression without breaching personal privacy.

CrosGrpsABS: Cross-Attention over Syntactic and Semantic Graphs for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis in a Low-Resource Language

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, offering fine-grained insights into opinions expressed in text. While existing research has largely focused on resource-rich languages like English which leveraging large annotated datasets, pre-trained models, and language-specific tools. These resources are often unavailable for low-resource languages such as Bengali. The ABSA task in Bengali remains poorly explored and is further complicated by its unique linguistic characteristics and a lack of annotated data, pre-trained models, and optimized hyperparameters. To address these challenges, this research propose CrosGrpsABS, a novel hybrid framework that leverages bidirectional cross-attention between syntactic and semantic graphs to enhance aspect-level sentiment classification. The CrosGrpsABS combines transformerbased contextual embeddings with graph convolutional networks, built upon rule-based syntactic dependency parsing and semantic similarity computations. By employing bidirectional crossattention, the model effectively fuses local syntactic structure with global semantic context, resulting in improved sentiment classification performance across both low- and high-resource settings. We evaluate CrosGrpsABS on four low-resource Bengali ABSA datasets and the high-resource English SemEval 2014 Task 4 dataset. The CrosGrpsABS consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving notable improvements, including a 0.93% F1-score increase for the Restaurant domain and a 1.06% gain for the Laptop domain in the SemEval 2014 Task 4 benchmark.

What Users Value and Critique: Large-Scale Analysis of User Feedback on AI-Powered Mobile Apps

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered features have rapidly proliferated across mobile apps in various domains, including productivity, education, entertainment, and creativity. However, how users perceive, evaluate, and critique these AI features remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the overwhelming volume of user feedback. In this work, we present the first comprehensive, large-scale study of user feedback on AI-powered mobile apps, leveraging a curated dataset of 292 AI-driven apps across 14 categories with 894K AI-specific reviews from Google Play. We develop and validate a multi-stage analysis pipeline that begins with a human-labeled benchmark and systematically evaluates large language models (LLMs) and prompting strategies. Each stage, including review classification, aspect-sentiment extraction, and clustering, is validated for accuracy and consistency. Our pipeline enables scalable, high-precision analysis of user feedback, extracting over one million aspect-sentiment pairs clustered into 18 positive and 15 negative user topics. Our analysis reveals that users consistently focus on a narrow set of themes: positive comments emphasize productivity, reliability, and personalized assistance, while negative feedback highlights technical failures (e.g., scanning and recognition), pricing concerns, and limitations in language support. Our pipeline surfaces both satisfaction with one feature and frustration with another within the same review. These fine-grained, co-occurring sentiments are often missed by traditional approaches that treat positive and negative feedback in isolation or rely on coarse-grained analysis. To this end, our approach provides a more faithful reflection of the real-world user experiences with AI-powered apps. Category-aware analysis further uncovers both universal drivers of satisfaction and domain-specific frustrations.

Sentiment Simulation using Generative AI Agents

Traditional sentiment analysis relies on surface-level linguistic patterns and retrospective data, limiting its ability to capture the psychological and contextual drivers of human sentiment. These limitations constrain its effectiveness in applications that require predictive insight, such as policy testing, narrative framing, and behavioral forecasting. We present a robust framework for sentiment simulation using generative AI agents embedded with psychologically rich profiles. Agents are instantiated from a nationally representative survey of 2,485 Filipino respondents, combining sociodemographic information with validated constructs of personality traits, values, beliefs, and socio-political attitudes. The framework includes three stages: (1) agent embodiment via categorical or contextualized encodings, (2) exposure to real-world political and economic scenarios, and (3) generation of sentiment ratings accompanied by explanatory rationales. Using Quadratic Weighted Accuracy (QWA), we evaluated alignment between agent-generated and human responses. Contextualized encoding achieved 92% alignment in replicating original survey responses. In sentiment simulation tasks, agents reached 81%--86% accuracy against ground truth sentiment, with contextualized profile encodings significantly outperforming categorical (p < 0.0001, Cohen's d = 0.70). Simulation results remained consistent across repeated trials (+/-0.2--0.5% SD) and resilient to variation in scenario framing (p = 0.9676, Cohen's d = 0.02). Our findings establish a scalable framework for sentiment modeling through psychographically grounded AI agents. This work signals a paradigm shift in sentiment analysis from retrospective classification to prospective and dynamic simulation grounded in psychology of sentiment formation.

PL-FGSA: A Prompt Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Based on MindSpore

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.

Multimodal Mixture of Low-Rank Experts for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition

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.

Picturized and Recited with Dialects: A Multimodal Chinese Representation Framework for Sentiment Analysis of Classical Chinese Poetry

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.

Multi-Domain ABSA Conversation Dataset Generation via LLMs for Real-World Evaluation and Model Comparison

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) offers granular insights into opinions but often suffers from the scarcity of diverse, labeled datasets that reflect real-world conversational nuances. This paper presents an approach for generating synthetic ABSA data using Large Language Models (LLMs) to address this gap. We detail the generation process aimed at producing data with consistent topic and sentiment distributions across multiple domains using GPT-4o. The quality and utility of the generated data were evaluated by assessing the performance of three state-of-the-art LLMs (Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and DeepSeek-R1) on topic and sentiment classification tasks. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the synthetic data, revealing distinct performance trade-offs among the models: DeepSeekR1 showed higher precision, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude 3.5 Sonnet exhibited strong recall, and Gemini 1.5 Pro offered significantly faster inference. We conclude that LLM-based synthetic data generation is a viable and flexible method for creating valuable ABSA resources, facilitating research and model evaluation without reliance on limited or inaccessible real-world labeled data.