ESG Sentiment Analysis: comparing human and language model performance including GPT

In this paper we explore the challenges of measuring sentiment in relation to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) social media. ESG has grown in importance in recent years with a surge in interest from the financial sector and the performance of many businesses has become based in part on their ESG related reputations. The use of sentiment analysis to measure ESG related reputation has developed and with it interest in the use of machines to do so. The era of digital media has created an explosion of new media sources, driven by the growth of social media platforms. This growing data environment has become an excellent source for behavioural insight studies across many disciplines that includes politics, healthcare and market research. Our study seeks to compare human performance with the cutting edge in machine performance in the measurement of ESG related sentiment. To this end researchers classify the sentiment of 150 tweets and a reliability measure is made. A gold standard data set is then established based on the consensus of 3 researchers and this data set is then used to measure the performance of different machine approaches: one based on the VADER dictionary approach to sentiment classification and then multiple language model approaches, including Llama2, T5, Mistral, Mixtral, FINBERT, GPT3.5 and GPT4.

CERM: Context-aware Literature-based Discovery via Sentiment Analysis

Driven by the abundance of biomedical publications, we introduce a sentiment analysis task to understand food-health relationship. Prior attempts to incorporate health into recipe recommendation and analysis systems have primarily focused on ingredient nutritional components or utilized basic computational models trained on curated labeled data. Enhanced models that capture the inherent relationship between food ingredients and biomedical concepts can be more beneficial for food-related research, given the wealth of information in biomedical texts. Considering the costly data labeling process, these models should effectively utilize both labeled and unlabeled data. This paper introduces Entity Relationship Sentiment Analysis (ERSA), a new task that captures the sentiment of a text based on an entity pair. ERSA extends the widely studied Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) task. Specifically, our study concentrates on the ERSA task applied to biomedical texts, focusing on (entity-entity) pairs of biomedical and food concepts. ERSA poses a significant challenge compared to traditional sentiment analysis tasks, as sentence sentiment may not align with entity relationship sentiment. Additionally, we propose CERM, a semi-supervised architecture that combines different word embeddings to enhance the encoding of the ERSA task. Experimental results showcase the model's efficiency across diverse learning scenarios.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses

Understanding preferences, opinions, and sentiment of the workforce is paramount for effective employee lifecycle management. Open-ended survey responses serve as a valuable source of information. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of Dutch open-ended responses in employee satisfaction surveys. Our approach aims to overcome the inherent noise and variability in these responses, enabling a comprehensive analysis of sentiments that can support employee lifecycle management. Through response clustering we identify six key aspects (salary, schedule, contact, communication, personal attention, agreements), which we validate by domain experts. We compile a dataset of 1,458 Dutch survey responses, revealing label imbalance in aspects and sentiments. We propose few-shot approaches for ABSA based on Dutch BERT models, and compare them against bag-of-words and zero-shot baselines. Our work significantly contributes to the field of ABSA by demonstrating the first successful application of Dutch pre-trained language models to aspect-based sentiment analysis in the domain of human resources (HR).

From attention to profit: quantitative trading strategy based on transformer

In traditional quantitative trading practice, navigating the complicated and dynamic financial market presents a persistent challenge. Former machine learning approaches have struggled to fully capture various market variables, often ignore long-term information and fail to catch up with essential signals that may lead the profit. This paper introduces an enhanced transformer architecture and designs a novel factor based on the model. By transfer learning from sentiment analysis, the proposed model not only exploits its original inherent advantages in capturing long-range dependencies and modelling complex data relationships but is also able to solve tasks with numerical inputs and accurately forecast future returns over a period. This work collects more than 5,000,000 rolling data of 4,601 stocks in the Chinese capital market from 2010 to 2019. The results of this study demonstrated the model's superior performance in predicting stock trends compared with other 100 factor-based quantitative strategies with lower turnover rates and a more robust half-life period. Notably, the model's innovative use transformer to establish factors, in conjunction with market sentiment information, has been shown to enhance the accuracy of trading signals significantly, thereby offering promising implications for the future of quantitative trading strategies.

Let's Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) stands as a crucial task in predicting the sentiment polarity associated with identified aspects within text. However, a notable challenge in ABSA lies in precisely determining the aspects' boundaries (start and end indices), especially for long ones, due to users' colloquial expressions. We propose DiffusionABSA, a novel diffusion model tailored for ABSA, which extracts the aspects progressively step by step. Particularly, DiffusionABSA gradually adds noise to the aspect terms in the training process, subsequently learning a denoising process that progressively restores these terms in a reverse manner. To estimate the boundaries, we design a denoising neural network enhanced by a syntax-aware temporal attention mechanism to chronologically capture the interplay between aspects and surrounding text. Empirical evaluations conducted on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Qlb6x/DiffusionABSA.

A Comparative Analysis of Noise Reduction Methods in Sentiment Analysis on Noisy Bangla Texts

While Bangla is considered a language with limited resources, sentiment analysis has been a subject of extensive research in the literature. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of exploration into sentiment analysis specifically in the realm of noisy Bangla texts. In this paper, we introduce a dataset (NC-SentNoB) that we annotated manually to identify ten different types of noise found in a pre-existing sentiment analysis dataset comprising of around 15K noisy Bangla texts. At first, given an input noisy text, we identify the noise type, addressing this as a multi-label classification task. Then, we introduce baseline noise reduction methods to alleviate noise prior to conducting sentiment analysis. Finally, we assess the performance of fine-tuned sentiment analysis models with both noisy and noise-reduced texts to make comparisons. The experimental findings indicate that the noise reduction methods utilized are not satisfactory, highlighting the need for more suitable noise reduction methods in future research endeavors. We have made the implementation and dataset presented in this paper publicly available at https://github.com/ktoufiquee/A-Comparative-Analysis-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods-in-Sentiment-Analysis-on-Noisy-Bangla-Texts

Extensible Multi-Granularity Fusion Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) evaluates sentiment expressions within a text to comprehend sentiment information. Previous studies integrated external knowledge, such as knowledge graphs, to enhance the semantic features in ABSA models. Recent research has examined the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on dependency and constituent trees for syntactic analysis. With the ongoing development of ABSA, more innovative linguistic and structural features are being incorporated (e.g. latent graph), but this also introduces complexity and confusion. As of now, a scalable framework for integrating diverse linguistic and structural features into ABSA does not exist. This paper presents the Extensible Multi-Granularity Fusion (EMGF) network, which integrates information from dependency and constituent syntactic, attention semantic , and external knowledge graphs. EMGF, equipped with multi-anchor triplet learning and orthogonal projection, efficiently harnesses the combined potential of each granularity feature and their synergistic interactions, resulting in a cumulative effect without additional computational expenses. Experimental findings on SemEval 2014 and Twitter datasets confirm EMGF's superiority over existing ABSA methods.

Sentiment analysis in non-fixed length audios using a Fully Convolutional Neural Network

In this work, a sentiment analysis method that is capable of accepting audio of any length, without being fixed a priori, is proposed. Mel spectrogram and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are used as audio description methods and a Fully Convolutional Neural Network architecture is proposed as a classifier. The results have been validated using three well known datasets: EMODB, RAVDESS, and TESS. The results obtained were promising, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. Also, thanks to the fact that the proposed method admits audios of any size, it allows a sentiment analysis to be made in near real time, which is very interesting for a wide range of fields such as call centers, medical consultations, or financial brokers.

Bloom-epistemic and sentiment analysis hierarchical classification in course discussion forums

Online discussion forums are widely used for active textual interaction between lecturers and students, and to see how the students have progressed in a learning process. The objective of this study is to compare appropriate machine-learning models to assess sentiments and Bloom\'s epistemic taxonomy based on textual comments in educational discussion forums. Our proposed method is called the hierarchical approach of Bloom-Epistemic and Sentiment Analysis (BE-Sent). The research methodology consists of three main steps. The first step is the data collection from the internal discussion forum and YouTube comments of a Web Programming channel. The next step is text preprocessing to annotate the text and clear unimportant words. Furthermore, with the text dataset that has been successfully cleaned, sentiment analysis and epistemic categorization will be done in each sentence of the text. Sentiment analysis is divided into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. Bloom\'s epistemic is divided into six categories: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. This research has succeeded in producing a course learning subsystem that assesses opinions based on text reviews of discussion forums according to the category of sentiment and epistemic analysis.

Entertainment chatbot for the digital inclusion of elderly people without abstraction capabilities

Current language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into ad hoc applications such as call centres and online shopping assistants. However, they have not been applied so far to social inclusion of elderly people, who are particularly vulnerable to the digital divide. Many of them relieve their loneliness with traditional media such as TV and radio, which are known to create a feeling of companionship. In this paper we present the EBER chatbot, designed to reduce the digital gap for the elderly. EBER reads news in the background and adapts its responses to the user's mood. Its novelty lies in the concept of "intelligent radio", according to which, instead of simplifying a digital information system to make it accessible to the elderly, a traditional channel they find familiar -- background news -- is augmented with interactions via voice dialogues. We make it possible by combining Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language, automatic Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis. The system allows accessing digital content of interest by combining words extracted from user answers to chatbot questions with keywords extracted from the news items. This approach permits defining metrics of the abstraction capabilities of the users depending on a spatial representation of the word space. To prove the suitability of the proposed solution we present results of real experiments conducted with elderly people that provided valuable insights. Our approach was considered satisfactory during the tests and improved the information search capabilities of the participants.