An Empirical Study on Instance Selection Strategies in Self-training for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a crucial task in natural language processing that involves identifying and extracting subjective sentiment from text. Self-training has recently emerged as an economical and efficient technique for developing sentiment analysis models by leveraging a small amount of labeled data and a larger amount of unlabeled data. However, the performance of a self-training procedure heavily relies on the choice of the instance selection strategy, which has not been studied thoroughly. This paper presents an empirical study on various instance selection strategies for self-training on two public sentiment datasets, and investigates the influence of the strategy and hyper-parameters on the performance of self-training in various few-shot settings.

Evaluation is all you need. Prompting Generative Large Language Models for Annotation Tasks in the Social Sciences. A Primer using Open Models

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

BanglaNLP at BLP-2023 Task 2: Benchmarking different Transformer Models for Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts

Bangla is the 7th most widely spoken language globally, with a staggering 234 million native speakers primarily hailing from India and Bangladesh. This morphologically rich language boasts a rich literary tradition, encompassing diverse dialects and language-specific challenges. Despite its linguistic richness and history, Bangla remains categorized as a low-resource language within the natural language processing (NLP) and speech community. This paper presents our submission to Task 2 (Sentiment Analysis of Bangla Social Media Posts) of the BLP Workshop. We experiment with various Transformer-based architectures to solve this task. Our quantitative results show that transfer learning really helps in better learning of the models in this low-resource language scenario. This becomes evident when we further finetune a model which has already been finetuned on twitter data for sentiment analysis task and that finetuned model performs the best among all other models. We also perform a detailed error analysis where we find some instances where ground truth labels need to be relooked at. We obtain a micro-F1 of 67.02\% on the test set and our performance in this shared task is ranked at 21 in the leaderboard.

Learning Language-guided Adaptive Hyper-modality Representation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Though Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) proves effective by utilizing rich information from multiple sources (e.g., language, video, and audio), the potential sentiment-irrelevant and conflicting information across modalities may hinder the performance from being further improved. To alleviate this, we present Adaptive Language-guided Multimodal Transformer (ALMT), which incorporates an Adaptive Hyper-modality Learning (AHL) module to learn an irrelevance/conflict-suppressing representation from visual and audio features under the guidance of language features at different scales. With the obtained hyper-modality representation, the model can obtain a complementary and joint representation through multimodal fusion for effective MSA. In practice, ALMT achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular datasets (e.g., MOSI, MOSEI and CH-SIMS) and an abundance of ablation demonstrates the validity and necessity of our irrelevance/conflict suppression mechanism.

HAlf-MAsked Model for Named Entity Sentiment analysis

Named Entity Sentiment analysis (NESA) is one of the most actively developing application domains in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Social media NESA is a significant field of opinion analysis since detecting and tracking sentiment trends in the news flow is crucial for building various analytical systems and monitoring the media image of specific people or companies. In this paper, we study different transformers-based solutions NESA in RuSentNE-23 evaluation. Despite the effectiveness of the BERT-like models, they can still struggle with certain challenges, such as overfitting, which appeared to be the main obstacle in achieving high accuracy on the RuSentNE-23 data. We present several approaches to overcome this problem, among which there is a novel technique of additional pass over given data with masked entity before making the final prediction so that we can combine logits from the model when it knows the exact entity it predicts sentiment for and when it does not. Utilizing this technique, we ensemble multiple BERT- like models trained on different subsets of data to improve overall performance. Our proposed model achieves the best result on RuSentNE-23 evaluation data and demonstrates improved consistency in entity-level sentiment analysis.

Systematic Literature Review: Computational Approaches for Humour Style Classification

Understanding various humour styles is essential for comprehending the multifaceted nature of humour and its impact on fields such as psychology and artificial intelligence. This understanding has revealed that humour, depending on the style employed, can either have therapeutic or detrimental effects on an individual's health and relationships. Although studies dedicated exclusively to computational-based humour style analysis remain somewhat rare, an expansive body of research thrives within related task, particularly binary humour and sarcasm recognition. In this systematic literature review (SLR), we survey the landscape of computational techniques applied to these related tasks and also uncover their fundamental relevance to humour style analysis. Through this study, we unveil common approaches, illuminate various datasets and evaluation metrics, and effectively navigate the complex terrain of humour research. Our efforts determine potential research gaps and outlined promising directions. Furthermore, the SLR identifies a range of features and computational models that can seamlessly transition from related tasks like binary humour and sarcasm detection to invigorate humour style classification. These features encompass incongruity, sentiment and polarity analysis, ambiguity detection, acoustic nuances, visual cues, contextual insights, and more. The computational models that emerge contain traditional machine learning paradigms, neural network architectures, transformer-based models, and specialised models attuned to the nuances of humour. Finally, the SLR provides access to existing datasets related to humour and sarcasm, facilitating the work of future researchers.

Fine-tuning and Utilization Methods of Domain-specific LLMs

Recent releases of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained considerable traction, yet research on fine-tuning and employing domain-specific LLMs remains scarce. This study investigates approaches for fine-tuning and leveraging domain-specific LLMs, highlighting trends in LLMs, foundational models, and methods for domain-specific pre-training. Focusing on the financial sector, it details dataset selection, preprocessing, model choice, and considerations crucial for LLM fine-tuning in finance. Addressing the unique characteristics of financial data, the study explores the construction of domain-specific vocabularies and considerations for security and regulatory compliance. In the practical application of LLM fine-tuning, the study outlines the procedure and implementation for generating domain-specific LLMs in finance. Various financial cases, including stock price prediction, sentiment analysis of financial news, automated document processing, research, information extraction, and customer service enhancement, are exemplified. The study explores the potential of LLMs in the financial domain, identifies limitations, and proposes directions for improvement, contributing valuable insights for future research. Ultimately, it advances natural language processing technology in business, suggesting proactive LLM utilization in financial services across industries.

Deep Emotions Across Languages: A Novel Approach for Sentiment Propagation in Multilingual WordNets

Sentiment analysis involves using WordNets enriched with emotional metadata, which are valuable resources. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and expensive, resulting in only a few WordNet Lexical Units being annotated. This paper introduces two new techniques for automatically propagating sentiment annotations from a partially annotated WordNet to its entirety and to a WordNet in a different language: Multilingual Structured Synset Embeddings (MSSE) and Cross-Lingual Deep Neural Sentiment Propagation (CLDNS). We evaluated the proposed MSSE+CLDNS method extensively using Princeton WordNet and Polish WordNet, which have many inter-lingual relations. Our results show that the MSSE+CLDNS method outperforms existing propagation methods, indicating its effectiveness in enriching WordNets with emotional metadata across multiple languages. This work provides a solid foundation for large-scale, multilingual sentiment analysis and is valuable for academic research and practical applications.

CIDER: Context sensitive sentiment analysis for short-form text

Researchers commonly perform sentiment analysis on large collections of short texts like tweets, Reddit posts or newspaper headlines that are all focused on a specific topic, theme or event. Usually, general purpose sentiment analysis methods are used which perform well on average but miss the variation in meaning that happens across different contexts, for example, the word "active" has a very different intention and valence in the phrase "active lifestyle" versus "active volcano". This work presents a new approach, CIDER (Context Informed Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner), which performs context sensitive sentiment analysis, where the valence of sentiment laden terms is inferred from the whole corpus before being used to score the individual texts. In this paper we detail the CIDER algorithm and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art generalist sentiment analysis on a large collection of tweets about the weather. We have made our implementation of CIDER available as a python package: https://pypi.org/project/ciderpolarity/.

Kernel Density Estimation for Multiclass Quantification

Several disciplines, like the social sciences, epidemiology, sentiment analysis, or market research, are interested in knowing the distribution of the classes in a population rather than the individual labels of the members thereof. Quantification is the supervised machine learning task concerned with obtaining accurate predictors of class prevalence, and to do so particularly in the presence of label shift. The distribution-matching (DM) approaches represent one of the most important families among the quantification methods that have been proposed in the literature so far. Current DM approaches model the involved populations by means of histograms of posterior probabilities. In this paper, we argue that their application to the multiclass setting is suboptimal since the histograms become class-specific, thus missing the opportunity to model inter-class information that may exist in the data. We propose a new representation mechanism based on multivariate densities that we model via kernel density estimation (KDE). The experiments we have carried out show our method, dubbed KDEy, yields superior quantification performance with respect to previous DM approaches. We also investigate the KDE-based representation within the maximum likelihood framework and show KDEy often shows superior performance with respect to the expectation-maximization method for quantification, arguably the strongest contender in the quantification arena to date.