This study presents a data-driven analysis of COVID-19 discourse on YouTube, examining the sentiment, toxicity, and thematic patterns of video content published between January 2023 and October 2024. The analysis involved applying advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques: sentiment analysis with VADER, toxicity detection with Detoxify, and topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The sentiment analysis revealed that 49.32% of video descriptions were positive, 36.63% were neutral, and 14.05% were negative, indicating a generally informative and supportive tone in pandemic-related content. Toxicity analysis identified only 0.91% of content as toxic, suggesting minimal exposure to toxic content. Topic modeling revealed two main themes, with 66.74% of the videos covering general health information and pandemic-related impacts and 33.26% focused on news and real-time updates, highlighting the dual informational role of YouTube. A recommendation system was also developed using TF-IDF vectorization and cosine similarity, refined by sentiment, toxicity, and topic filters to ensure relevant and context-aligned video recommendations. This system achieved 69% aggregate coverage, with monthly coverage rates consistently above 85%, demonstrating robust performance and adaptability over time. Evaluation across recommendation sizes showed coverage reaching 69% for five video recommendations and 79% for ten video recommendations per video. In summary, this work presents a framework for understanding COVID-19 discourse on YouTube and a recommendation system that supports user engagement while promoting responsible and relevant content related to COVID-19.

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

In this paper, we reported our experiments with various strategies to improve code-mixed humour and sarcasm detection. We did all of our experiments for Hindi-English code-mixed scenario, as we have the linguistic expertise for the same. We experimented with three approaches, namely (i) native sample mixing, (ii) multi-task learning (MTL), and (iii) prompting very large multilingual language models (VMLMs). In native sample mixing, we added monolingual task samples in code-mixed training sets. In MTL learning, we relied on native and code-mixed samples of a semantically related task (hate detection in our case). Finally, in our third approach, we evaluated the efficacy of VMLMs via few-shot context prompting. Some interesting findings we got are (i) adding native samples improved humor (raising the F1-score up to 6.76%) and sarcasm (raising the F1-score up to 8.64%) detection, (ii) training MLMs in an MTL framework boosted performance for both humour (raising the F1-score up to 10.67%) and sarcasm (increment up to 12.35% in F1-score) detection, and (iii) prompting VMLMs couldn't outperform the other approaches. Finally, our ablation studies and error analysis discovered the cases where our model is yet to improve. We provided our code for reproducibility.

Sentiment analysis is an essential component of natural language processing, used to analyze sentiments, attitudes, and emotional tones in various contexts. It provides valuable insights into public opinion, customer feedback, and user experiences. Researchers have developed various classical machine learning and neuro-fuzzy approaches to address the exponential growth of data and the complexity of language structures in sentiment analysis. However, these approaches often fail to determine the optimal number of clusters, interpret results accurately, handle noise or outliers efficiently, and scale effectively to high-dimensional data. Additionally, they are frequently insensitive to input variations. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach for sentiment analysis called the Quantum Fuzzy Neural Network (QFNN), which leverages quantum properties and incorporates a fuzzy layer to overcome the limitations of classical sentiment analysis algorithms. In this study, we test the proposed approach on two Twitter datasets: the Coronavirus Tweets Dataset (CVTD) and the General Sentimental Tweets Dataset (GSTD), and compare it with classical and hybrid algorithms. The results demonstrate that QFNN outperforms all classical, quantum, and hybrid algorithms, achieving 100% and 90% accuracy in the case of CVTD and GSTD, respectively. Furthermore, QFNN demonstrates its robustness against six different noise models, providing the potential to tackle the computational complexity associated with sentiment analysis on a large scale in a noisy environment. The proposed approach expedites sentiment data processing and precisely analyses different forms of textual data, thereby enhancing sentiment classification and insights associated with sentiment analysis.

Recent works in clustering-based topic models perform well in monolingual topic identification by introducing a pipeline to cluster the contextualized representations. However, the pipeline is suboptimal in identifying topics across languages due to the presence of language-dependent dimensions (LDDs) generated by multilingual language models. To address this issue, we introduce a novel, SVD-based dimension refinement component into the pipeline of the clustering-based topic model. This component effectively neutralizes the negative impact of LDDs, enabling the model to accurately identify topics across languages. Our experiments on three datasets demonstrate that the updated pipeline with the dimension refinement component generally outperforms other state-of-the-art cross-lingual topic models.

This study investigates the dynamics of extreme opinions on social media during the 2023 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, utilising a comprehensive dataset of over 450,000 posts from four Reddit subreddits (r/Palestine, r/Judaism, r/IsraelPalestine, and r/worldnews). A lexicon-based, unsupervised methodology was developed to measure "extreme opinions" by considering factors such as anger, polarity, and subjectivity. The analysis identifies significant peaks in extremism scores that correspond to pivotal real-life events, such as the IDF's bombings of Al Quds Hospital and the Jabalia Refugee Camp, and the end of a ceasefire following a terrorist attack. Additionally, this study explores the distribution and correlation of these scores across different subreddits and over time, providing insights into the propagation of polarised sentiments in response to conflict events. By examining the quantitative effects of each score on extremism and analysing word cloud similarities through Jaccard indices, the research offers a nuanced understanding of the factors driving extreme online opinions. This approach underscores the potential of social media analytics in capturing the complex interplay between real-world events and online discourse, while also highlighting the limitations and challenges of measuring extremism in social media contexts.

This paper introduces the human-like embodied AI interviewer which integrates android robots equipped with advanced conversational capabilities, including attentive listening, conversational repairs, and user fluency adaptation. Moreover, it can analyze and present results post-interview. We conducted a real-world case study at SIGDIAL 2024 with 42 participants, of whom 69% reported positive experiences. This study demonstrated the system's effectiveness in conducting interviews just like a human and marked the first employment of such a system at an international conference. The demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/jCuw9g99KuE.

Topic models allow researchers to extract latent factors from text data and use those variables in downstream statistical analyses. However, these methodologies can vary significantly due to initialization differences, randomness in sampling procedures, or noisy data. Reliability of these methods is of particular concern as many researchers treat learned topic models as ground truth for subsequent analyses. In this work, we show that the standard practice for quantifying topic model reliability fails to capture essential aspects of the variation in two widely-used topic models. Drawing from a extensive literature on measurement theory, we provide empirical and theoretical analyses of three other metrics for evaluating the reliability of topic models. On synthetic and real-world data, we show that McDonald's $\omega$ provides the best encapsulation of reliability. This metric provides an essential tool for validation of topic model methodologies that should be a standard component of any topic model-based research.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) stands as a critical research frontier, seeking to comprehensively unravel human emotions by amalgamating text, audio, and visual data. Yet, discerning subtle emotional nuances within audio and video expressions poses a formidable challenge, particularly when emotional polarities across various segments appear similar. In this paper, our objective is to spotlight emotion-relevant attributes of audio and visual modalities to facilitate multimodal fusion in the context of nuanced emotional shifts in visual-audio scenarios. To this end, we introduce DEVA, a progressive fusion framework founded on textual sentiment descriptions aimed at accentuating emotional features of visual-audio content. DEVA employs an Emotional Description Generator (EDG) to transmute raw audio and visual data into textualized sentiment descriptions, thereby amplifying their emotional characteristics. These descriptions are then integrated with the source data to yield richer, enhanced features. Furthermore, DEVA incorporates the Text-guided Progressive Fusion Module (TPF), leveraging varying levels of text as a core modality guide. This module progressively fuses visual-audio minor modalities to alleviate disparities between text and visual-audio modalities. Experimental results on widely used sentiment analysis benchmark datasets, including MOSI, MOSEI, and CH-SIMS, underscore significant enhancements compared to state-of-the-art models. Moreover, fine-grained emotion experiments corroborate the robust sensitivity of DEVA to subtle emotional variations.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) highlights the essence of financial news in stock price movement. Financial news comes in the form of corporate announcements, news titles, and other forms of digital text. The generation of insights from financial news can be done with sentiment analysis. General-purpose language models are too general for sentiment analysis in finance. Curated labeled data for fine-tuning general-purpose language models are scare, and existing fine-tuned models for sentiment analysis in finance do not capture the maximum context width. We hypothesize that using actual and synthetic data can improve performance. We introduce BertNSP-finance to concatenate shorter financial sentences into longer financial sentences, and finbert-lc to determine sentiment from digital text. The results show improved performance on the accuracy and the f1 score for the financial phrasebank data with $50\%$ and $100\%$ agreement levels.