Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at extracting opinionated aspect terms in review texts and determining their sentiment polarities, which is widely studied in both academia and industry. As a fine-grained classification task, the annotation cost is extremely high. Domain adaptation is a popular solution to alleviate the data deficiency issue in new domains by transferring common knowledge across domains. Most cross-domain ABSA studies are based on structure correspondence learning (SCL), and use pivot features to construct auxiliary tasks for narrowing down the gap between domains. However, their pivot-based auxiliary tasks can only transfer knowledge of aspect terms but not sentiment, limiting the performance of existing models. In this work, we propose a novel Syntax-guided Domain Adaptation Model, named SDAM, for more effective cross-domain ABSA. SDAM exploits syntactic structure similarities for building pseudo training instances, during which aspect terms of target domain are explicitly related to sentiment polarities. Besides, we propose a syntax-based BERT mask language model for further capturing domain-invariant features. Finally, to alleviate the sentiment inconsistency issue in multi-gram aspect terms, we introduce a span-based joint aspect term and sentiment analysis module into the cross-domain End2End ABSA. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with respect to Micro-F1 metric for the cross-domain End2End ABSA task.
Analyzing memes on the internet has emerged as a crucial endeavor due to the impact this multi-modal form of content wields in shaping online discourse. Memes have become a powerful tool for expressing emotions and sentiments, possibly even spreading hate and misinformation, through humor and sarcasm. In this paper, we present the overview of the Memotion 3 shared task, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI-23. The task released an annotated dataset of Hindi-English code-mixed memes based on their Sentiment (Task A), Emotion (Task B), and Emotion intensity (Task C). Each of these is defined as an individual task and the participants are ranked separately for each task. Over 50 teams registered for the shared task and 5 made final submissions to the test set of the Memotion 3 dataset. CLIP, BERT modifications, ViT etc. were the most popular models among the participants along with approaches such as Student-Teacher model, Fusion, and Ensembling. The best final F1 score for Task A is 34.41, Task B is 79.77 and Task C is 59.82.
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task which involves four elements from user-generated texts: aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Most computational approaches focus on some of the ABSA sub-tasks such as tuple (aspect term, sentiment polarity) or triplet (aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity) extraction using either pipeline or joint modeling approaches. Recently, generative approaches have been proposed to extract all four elements as (one or more) quadruplets from text as a single task. In this work, we take a step further and propose a unified framework for solving ABSA, and the associated sub-tasks to improve the performance in few-shot scenarios. To this end, we fine-tune a T5 model with instructional prompts in a multi-task learning fashion covering all the sub-tasks, as well as the entire quadruple prediction task. In experiments with multiple benchmark data sets, we show that the proposed multi-task prompting approach brings performance boost (by absolute $6.75$ F1) in the few-shot learning setting.
Opinion mining, also known as sentiment analysis, is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that focuses on identifying and extracting subjective information in textual material. This can include determining the overall sentiment of a piece of text (e.g., positive or negative), as well as identifying specific emotions or opinions expressed in the text, that involves the use of advanced machine and deep learning techniques. Recently, transformer-based language models make this task of human emotion analysis intuitive, thanks to the attention mechanism and parallel computation. These advantages make such models very powerful on linguistic tasks, unlike recurrent neural networks that spend a lot of time on sequential processing, making them prone to fail when it comes to processing long text. The scope of our paper aims to study the behaviour of the cutting-edge Transformer-based language models on opinion mining and provide a high-level comparison between them to highlight their key particularities. Additionally, our comparative study shows leads and paves the way for production engineers regarding the approach to focus on and is useful for researchers as it provides guidelines for future research subjects.
The amount of opinionated data on the internet is rapidly increasing. More and more people are sharing their ideas and opinions in reviews, discussion forums, microblogs and general social media. As opinions are central in all human activities, sentiment analysis has been applied to gain insights in this type of data. There are proposed several approaches for sentiment classification. The major drawback is the lack of standardized solutions for classification and high-level visualization. In this study, a sentiment analyzer dashboard for online social networking analysis is proposed. This, to enable people gaining insights in topics interesting to them. The tool allows users to run the desired sentiment analysis algorithm in the dashboard. In addition to providing several visualization types, the dashboard facilitates raw data results from the sentiment classification which can be downloaded for further analysis.
Sentiment Analysis Systems (SASs) are data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that, given a piece of text, assign one or more numbers conveying the polarity and emotional intensity expressed in the input. Like other automatic machine learning systems, they have also been known to exhibit model uncertainty where a (small) change in the input leads to drastic swings in the output. This can be especially problematic when inputs are related to protected features like gender or race since such behavior can be perceived as a lack of fairness, i.e., bias. We introduce a novel method to assess and rate SASs where inputs are perturbed in a controlled causal setting to test if the output sentiment is sensitive to protected variables even when other components of the textual input, e.g., chosen emotion words, are fixed. We then use the result to assign labels (ratings) at fine-grained and overall levels to convey the robustness of the SAS to input changes. The ratings serve as a principled basis to compare SASs and choose among them based on behavior. It benefits all users, especially developers who reuse off-the-shelf SASs to build larger AI systems but do not have access to their code or training data to compare.
This paper proposes a method of abstractive summarization designed to scale to document collections instead of individual documents. Our approach applies a combination of semantic clustering, document size reduction within topic clusters, semantic chunking of a cluster's documents, GPT-based summarization and concatenation, and a combined sentiment and text visualization of each topic to support exploratory data analysis. Statistical comparison of our results to existing state-of-the-art systems BART, BRIO, PEGASUS, and MoCa using ROGUE summary scores showed statistically equivalent performance with BART and PEGASUS on the CNN/Daily Mail test dataset, and with BART on the Gigaword test dataset. This finding is promising since we view document collection summarization as more challenging than individual document summarization. We conclude with a discussion of how issues of scale are
This study aimed to investigate the influence of the presence of informal language, such as emoticons and slang, on the performance of sentiment analysis models applied to social media text. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model was developed and trained on three datasets: a sarcasm dataset, a sentiment dataset, and an emoticon dataset. The model architecture was held constant for all experiments and the model was trained on 80% of the data and tested on 20%. The results revealed that the model achieved an accuracy of 96.47% on the sarcasm dataset, with the lowest accuracy for class 1. On the sentiment dataset, the model achieved an accuracy of 95.28%. The amalgamation of sarcasm and sentiment datasets improved the accuracy of the model to 95.1%, and the addition of emoticon dataset has a slight positive impact on the accuracy of the model to 95.37%. The study suggests that the presence of informal language has a restricted impact on the performance of sentiment analysis models applied to social media text. However, the inclusion of emoticon data to the model can enhance the accuracy slightly.
Named entity recognition (NER) systems have seen rapid progress in recent years due to the development of deep neural networks. These systems are widely used in various natural language processing applications, such as information extraction, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, the complexity and intractability of deep neural networks can make NER systems unreliable in certain circumstances, resulting in incorrect predictions. For example, NER systems may misidentify female names as chemicals or fail to recognize the names of minority groups, leading to user dissatisfaction. To tackle this problem, we introduce TIN, a novel, widely applicable approach for automatically testing and repairing various NER systems. The key idea for automated testing is that the NER predictions of the same named entities under similar contexts should be identical. The core idea for automated repairing is that similar named entities should have the same NER prediction under the same context. We use TIN to test two SOTA NER models and two commercial NER APIs, i.e., Azure NER and AWS NER. We manually verify 784 of the suspicious issues reported by TIN and find that 702 are erroneous issues, leading to high precision (85.0%-93.4%) across four categories of NER errors: omission, over-labeling, incorrect category, and range error. For automated repairing, TIN achieves a high error reduction rate (26.8%-50.6%) over the four systems under test, which successfully repairs 1,056 out of the 1,877 reported NER errors.
This study investigates the relationship between narratives conveyed through microblogging platforms, namely Twitter, and the value of crypto assets. Our study provides a unique technique to build narratives about cryptocurrency by combining topic modelling of short texts with sentiment analysis. First, we used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to discover the latent topics within the massive and noisy textual data from Twitter, and then we revealed 4-5 cryptocurrency-related narratives, including financial investment, technological advancement related to crypto, financial and political regulations, crypto assets, and media coverage. In a number of situations, we noticed a strong link between our narratives and crypto prices. Our work connects the most recent innovation in economics, Narrative Economics, to a new area of study that combines topic modelling and sentiment analysis to relate consumer behaviour to narratives.