Explainable AI (XAI) algorithms aim to help users understand how a machine learning model makes predictions. To this end, many approaches explain which input features are most predictive of a target label. However, such explanations can still be puzzling to users (e.g., in product reviews, the word "problems" is predictive of positive sentiment). If left unexplained, puzzling explanations can have negative impacts. Explaining unintuitive associations between an input feature and a target label is an underexplored area in XAI research. We take an initial effort in this direction using unintuitive associations learned by sentiment classifiers as a case study. We propose approaches for (1) automatically detecting associations that can appear unintuitive to users and (2) generating explanations to help users understand why an unintuitive feature is predictive. Results from a crowdsourced study (N=300) found that our proposed approaches can effectively detect and explain predictive but unintuitive features in sentiment classification.
Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to understand opinions in a granular manner, advancing human-computer interaction and other fields. Traditionally, MABSA methods use a joint prediction approach to identify aspects and sentiments simultaneously. However, we argue that joint models are not always superior. Our analysis shows that joint models struggle to align relevant text tokens with image patches, leading to misalignment and ineffective image utilization. In contrast, a pipeline framework first identifies aspects through MATE (Multimodal Aspect Term Extraction) and then aligns these aspects with image patches for sentiment classification (MASC: Multimodal Aspect-Oriented Sentiment Classification). This method is better suited for multimodal scenarios where effective image use is crucial. We present three key observations: (a) MATE and MASC have different feature requirements, with MATE focusing on token-level features and MASC on sequence-level features; (b) the aspect identified by MATE is crucial for effective image utilization; and (c) images play a trivial role in previous MABSA methods due to high noise. Based on these observations, we propose a pipeline framework that first predicts the aspect and then uses translation-based alignment (TBA) to enhance multimodal semantic consistency for better image utilization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on widely used MABSA datasets Twitter-15 and Twitter-17. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the pipeline approach and its potential to provide valuable insights for future MABSA research. For reproducibility, the code and checkpoint will be released.
The explainability of recommender systems has attracted significant attention in academia and industry. Many efforts have been made for explainable recommendations, yet evaluating the quality of the explanations remains a challenging and unresolved issue. In recent years, leveraging LLMs as evaluators presents a promising avenue in Natural Language Processing tasks (e.g., sentiment classification, information extraction), as they perform strong capabilities in instruction following and common-sense reasoning. However, evaluating recommendation explanatory texts is different from these NLG tasks, as its criteria are related to human perceptions and are usually subjective. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs can serve as evaluators of recommendation explanations. To answer the question, we utilize real user feedback on explanations given from previous work and additionally collect third-party annotations and LLM evaluations. We design and apply a 3-level meta evaluation strategy to measure the correlation between evaluator labels and the ground truth provided by users. Our experiments reveal that LLMs, such as GPT4, can provide comparable evaluations with appropriate prompts and settings. We also provide further insights into combining human labels with the LLM evaluation process and utilizing ensembles of multiple heterogeneous LLM evaluators to enhance the accuracy and stability of evaluations. Our study verifies that utilizing LLMs as evaluators can be an accurate, reproducible and cost-effective solution for evaluating recommendation explanation texts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-SZ/LLMasEvaluator.
Sentiment analysis, an increasingly vital field in both academia and industry, plays a pivotal role in machine learning applications, particularly on social media platforms like Reddit. However, the efficacy of sentiment analysis models is hindered by the lack of expansive and fine-grained emotion datasets. To address this gap, our study leverages the GoEmotions dataset, comprising a diverse range of emotions, to evaluate sentiment analysis methods across a substantial corpus of 58,000 comments. Distinguished from prior studies by the Google team, which limited their analysis to only two models, our research expands the scope by evaluating a diverse array of models. We investigate the performance of traditional classifiers such as Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVM), as well as state-of-the-art transformer-based models including BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT. Furthermore, our evaluation criteria extend beyond accuracy to encompass nuanced assessments, including hierarchical classification based on varying levels of granularity in emotion categorization. Additionally, considerations such as computational efficiency are incorporated to provide a comprehensive evaluation framework. Our findings reveal that the RoBERTa model consistently outperforms the baseline models, demonstrating superior accuracy in fine-grained sentiment classification tasks. This underscores the substantial potential and significance of the RoBERTa model in advancing sentiment analysis capabilities.
In machine learning, temporal shifts occur when there are differences between training and test splits in terms of time. For streaming data such as news or social media, models are commonly trained on a fixed corpus from a certain period of time, and they can become obsolete due to the dynamism and evolving nature of online content. This paper focuses on temporal shifts in social media and, in particular, Twitter. We propose a unified evaluation scheme to assess the performance of language models (LMs) under temporal shift on standard social media tasks. LMs are tested on five diverse social media NLP tasks under different temporal settings, which revealed two important findings: (i) the decrease in performance under temporal shift is consistent across different models for entity-focused tasks such as named entity recognition or disambiguation, and hate speech detection, but not significant in the other tasks analysed (i.e., topic and sentiment classification); and (ii) continuous pre-training on the test period does not improve the temporal adaptability of LMs.
Inspired by the 'Bias Considerations in Bilingual Natural Language Processing' report by Statistics Canada, this study delves into potential biases in multilingual sentiment analysis between English and French. Given a 50-50 dataset of French and English, we aim to determine if there exists a language bias and explore how the incorporation of more diverse datasets in the future might affect the equity of multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. By employing Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayes models on three balanced datasets, we reveal potential biases in multilingual sentiment classification. Utilizing Fairlearn, a tool for assessing bias in machine learning models, our findings indicate nuanced outcomes. With French data outperforming English across accuracy, recall, and F1 score metrics in both models, hinting at a language bias favoring French. However, Fairlearn's metrics suggest that the SVM approaches equitable levels with a demographic parity ratio of 0.963, 0.989, and 0.985 for the three separate datasets, indicating near-equitable treatment across languages. In contrast, Naive Bayes demonstrates greater disparities, evidenced by a demographic parity ratio of 0.813, 0.908, and 0.961. These findings reveal the importance of developing equitable multilingual NLP systems, particularly as we anticipate the inclusion of more datasets in various languages in the future.
The chess domain is well-suited for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) system that mimics real-world challenges, including decision-making. Throughout the years, minimal attention has been paid to investigating insights derived from unstructured chess data sources. In this study, we examine the complicated relationships between multiple referenced moves in a chess-teaching textbook, and propose a novel method designed to encapsulate chess knowledge derived from move-action phrases. This study investigates the feasibility of using a modified sentiment analysis method as a means for evaluating chess moves based on text. Our proposed Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) method represents an advancement in evaluating the sentiment associated with referenced chess moves. By extracting insights from move-action phrases, our approach aims to provide a more fine-grained and contextually aware `chess move'-based sentiment classification. Through empirical experiments and analysis, we evaluate the performance of our fine-tuned ABSA model, presenting results that confirm the efficiency of our approach in advancing aspect-based sentiment classification within the chess domain. This research contributes to the area of game-playing by machines and shows the practical applicability of leveraging NLP techniques to understand the context of strategic games.
Although pre-trained language models have exhibited great flexibility and versatility with prompt-based few-shot learning, they suffer from the extensive parameter size and limited applicability for inference. Recent studies have suggested that PLMs be used as dataset generators and a tiny task-specific model be trained to achieve efficient inference. However, their applicability to various domains is limited because they tend to generate domain-specific datasets. In this work, we propose a novel approach to universal domain generalization that generates a dataset regardless of the target domain. This allows for generalization of the tiny task model to any domain that shares the label space, thus enhancing the real-world applicability of the dataset generation paradigm. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method accomplishes generalizability across various domains while using a parameter set that is orders of magnitude smaller than PLMs.
In this work we investigate the capability of Graph Attention Network for extracting aspect and opinion terms. Aspect and opinion term extraction is posed as a token-level classification task akin to named entity recognition. We use the dependency tree of the input query as additional feature in a Graph Attention Network along with the token and part-of-speech features. We show that the dependency structure is a powerful feature that in the presence of a CRF layer substantially improves the performance and generates the best result on the commonly used datasets from SemEval 2014, 2015 and 2016. We experiment with additional layers like BiLSTM and Transformer in addition to the CRF layer. We also show that our approach works well in the presence of multiple aspects or sentiments in the same query and it is not necessary to modify the dependency tree based on a single aspect as was the original application for sentiment classification.
Saliency post-hoc explainability methods are important tools for understanding increasingly complex NLP models. While these methods can reflect the model's reasoning, they may not align with human intuition, making the explanations not plausible. In this work, we present a methodology for incorporating rationales, which are text annotations explaining human decisions, into text classification models. This incorporation enhances the plausibility of post-hoc explanations while preserving their faithfulness. Our approach is agnostic to model architectures and explainability methods. We introduce the rationales during model training by augmenting the standard cross-entropy loss with a novel loss function inspired by contrastive learning. By leveraging a multi-objective optimization algorithm, we explore the trade-off between the two loss functions and generate a Pareto-optimal frontier of models that balance performance and plausibility. Through extensive experiments involving diverse models, datasets, and explainability methods, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality of model explanations without causing substantial (sometimes negligible) degradation in the original model's performance.
This paper presents KazSAnDRA, a dataset developed for Kazakh sentiment analysis that is the first and largest publicly available dataset of its kind. KazSAnDRA comprises an extensive collection of 180,064 reviews obtained from various sources and includes numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 5, providing a quantitative representation of customer attitudes. The study also pursued the automation of Kazakh sentiment classification through the development and evaluation of four machine learning models trained for both polarity classification and score classification. Experimental analysis included evaluation of the results considering both balanced and imbalanced scenarios. The most successful model attained an F1-score of 0.81 for polarity classification and 0.39 for score classification on the test sets. The dataset and fine-tuned models are open access and available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to identify terms or multiword expressions (MWEs) on which sentiments are expressed and the sentiment polarities associated with them. The development of supervised models has been at the forefront of research in this area. However, training these models requires the availability of manually annotated datasets which is both expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, the available annotated datasets are tailored to a specific domain, language, and text type. In this work, we address this notable challenge in current state-of-the-art ABSA research. We propose a hybrid approach for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis using transfer learning. The approach focuses on generating weakly-supervised annotations by exploiting the strengths of both large language models (LLM) and traditional syntactic dependencies. We utilise syntactic dependency structures of sentences to complement the annotations generated by LLMs, as they may overlook domain-specific aspect terms. Extensive experimentation on multiple datasets is performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our hybrid method for the tasks of aspect term extraction and aspect sentiment classification. Keywords: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis, Syntactic Parsing, large language model (LLM)
A community needs assessment is a tool used by non-profits and government agencies to quantify the strengths and issues of a community, allowing them to allocate their resources better. Such approaches are transitioning towards leveraging social media conversations to analyze the needs of communities and the assets already present within them. However, manual analysis of exponentially increasing social media conversations is challenging. There is a gap in the present literature in computationally analyzing how community members discuss the strengths and needs of the community. To address this gap, we introduce the task of identifying, extracting, and categorizing community needs and assets from conversational data using sophisticated natural language processing methods. To facilitate this task, we introduce the first dataset about community needs and assets consisting of 3,511 conversations from Reddit, annotated using crowdsourced workers. Using this dataset, we evaluate an utterance-level classification model compared to sentiment classification and a popular large language model (in a zero-shot setting), where we find that our model outperforms both baselines at an F1 score of 94% compared to 49% and 61% respectively. Furthermore, we observe through our study that conversations about needs have negative sentiments and emotions, while conversations about assets focus on location and entities. The dataset is available at https://github.com/towhidabsar/CommunityNeeds.
There are multiple sources of financial news online which influence market movements and trader's decisions. This highlights the need for accurate sentiment analysis, in addition to having appropriate algorithmic trading techniques, to arrive at better informed trading decisions. Standard lexicon based sentiment approaches have demonstrated their power in aiding financial decisions. However, they are known to suffer from issues related to context sensitivity and word ordering. Large Language Models (LLMs) can also be used in this context, but they are not finance-specific and tend to require significant computational resources. To facilitate a finance specific LLM framework, we introduce a novel approach based on the Llama 2 7B foundational model, in order to benefit from its generative nature and comprehensive language manipulation. This is achieved by fine-tuning the Llama2 7B model on a small portion of supervised financial sentiment analysis data, so as to jointly handle the complexities of financial lexicon and context, and further equipping it with a neural network based decision mechanism. Such a generator-classifier scheme, referred to as FinLlama, is trained not only to classify the sentiment valence but also quantify its strength, thus offering traders a nuanced insight into financial news articles. Complementing this, the implementation of parameter-efficient fine-tuning through LoRA optimises trainable parameters, thus minimising computational and memory requirements, without sacrificing accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed FinLlama to provide a framework for enhanced portfolio management decisions and increased market returns. These results underpin the ability of FinLlama to construct high-return portfolios which exhibit enhanced resilience, even during volatile periods and unpredictable market events.
This manuscript presents a methodical examination of the utilization of Artificial Intelligence in the assessment of emotions in texts related to healthcare, with a particular focus on the incorporation of Natural Language Processing and deep learning technologies. We scrutinize numerous research studies that employ AI to augment sentiment analysis, categorize emotions, and forecast patient outcomes based on textual information derived from clinical narratives, patient feedback on medications, and online health discussions. The review demonstrates noteworthy progress in the precision of algorithms used for sentiment classification, the prognostic capabilities of AI models for neurodegenerative diseases, and the creation of AI-powered systems that offer support in clinical decision-making. Remarkably, the utilization of AI applications has exhibited an enhancement in personalized therapy plans by integrating patient sentiment and contributing to the early identification of mental health disorders. There persist challenges, which encompass ensuring the ethical application of AI, safeguarding patient confidentiality, and addressing potential biases in algorithmic procedures. Nevertheless, the potential of AI to revolutionize healthcare practices is unmistakable, offering a future where healthcare is not only more knowledgeable and efficient but also more empathetic and centered around the needs of patients. This investigation underscores the transformative influence of AI on healthcare, delivering a comprehensive comprehension of its role in examining emotional content in healthcare texts and highlighting the trajectory towards a more compassionate approach to patient care. The findings advocate for a harmonious synergy between AI's analytical capabilities and the human aspects of healthcare.
As more than 70$\%$ of reviews in the existing opinion summary data set are positive, current opinion summarization approaches are reluctant to generate negative summaries given the input of negative texts. To address such sentiment bias, a direct approach without the over-reliance on a specific framework is to generate additional data based on large language models to balance the emotional distribution of the dataset. However, data augmentation based on large language models faces two disadvantages: 1) the potential issues or toxicity in the augmented data; 2) the expensive costs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation framework based on both large and small language models for debiasing opinion summarization. In specific, a small size of synthesized negative reviews is obtained by rewriting the positive text via a large language model. Then, a disentangle reconstruction model is trained based on the generated data. After training, a large amount of synthetic data can be obtained by decoding the new representation obtained from the combination of different sample representations and filtering based on confusion degree and sentiment classification. Experiments have proved that our framework can effectively alleviate emotional bias same as using only large models, but more economically.
The lack of a suitable tool for the analysis of conversational texts in the Persian language has made various analyses of these texts, including Sentiment Analysis, difficult. In this research, we tried to make the understanding of these texts easier for the machine by providing PSC, Persian Slang Converter, a tool for converting conversational texts into formal ones, and by using the most up-to-date and best deep learning methods along with the PSC, the sentiment learning of short Persian language texts for the machine in a better way. be made More than 10 million unlabeled texts from various social networks and movie subtitles (as Conversational texts) and about 10 million news texts (as formal texts) have been used for training unsupervised models and formal implementation of the tool. 60,000 texts from the comments of Instagram social network users with positive, negative, and neutral labels are considered supervised data for training the emotion classification model of short texts. Using the formal tool, 57% of the words of the corpus of conversation were converted. Finally, by using the formalizer, FastText model, and deep LSTM network, an accuracy of 81.91 was obtained on the test data.
In this study, ChatGPT is utilized to create streamlined models that generate easily interpretable features. These features are then used to evaluate financial outcomes from earnings calls. We detail a training approach that merges knowledge distillation and transfer learning, resulting in lightweight topic and sentiment classification models without significant loss in accuracy. These models are assessed through a dataset annotated by experts. The paper also delves into two practical case studies, highlighting how the generated features can be effectively utilized in quantitative investing scenarios.
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.
This paper explores the challenges posed by aspect-based sentiment classification (ABSC) within pretrained language models (PLMs), with a particular focus on contextualization and hallucination issues. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce CARBD-Ko (a Contextually Annotated Review Benchmark Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification in Korean), a benchmark dataset that incorporates aspects and dual-tagged polarities to distinguish between aspect-specific and aspect-agnostic sentiment classification. The dataset consists of sentences annotated with specific aspects, aspect polarity, aspect-agnostic polarity, and the intensity of aspects. To address the issue of dual-tagged aspect polarities, we propose a novel approach employing a Siamese Network. Our experimental findings highlight the inherent difficulties in accurately predicting dual-polarities and underscore the significance of contextualized sentiment analysis models. The CARBD-Ko dataset serves as a valuable resource for future research endeavors in aspect-level sentiment classification.