We present a novel approach for LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic reconstruction.

Sentiment Analysis is widely used to quantify sentiment in text, but its application to literary texts poses unique challenges due to figurative language, stylistic ambiguity, as well as sentiment evocation strategies. Traditional dictionary-based tools often underperform, especially for low-resource languages, and transformer models, while promising, typically output coarse categorical labels that limit fine-grained analysis. We introduce a novel continuous sentiment scoring method based on concept vector projection, trained on multilingual literary data, which more effectively captures nuanced sentiment expressions across genres, languages, and historical periods. Our approach outperforms existing tools on English and Danish texts, producing sentiment scores whose distribution closely matches human ratings, enabling more accurate analysis and sentiment arc modeling in literature.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity for specific aspect terms, a task made difficult by conflicting sentiments across aspects and the sparse context of short texts. Prior graph-based approaches model only pairwise dependencies, forcing them to construct multiple graphs for different relational views. These introduce redundancy, parameter overhead, and error propagation during fusion, limiting robustness in short-text, low-resource settings. We present HyperABSA, a dynamic hypergraph framework that induces aspect-opinion structures through sample-specific hierarchical clustering. To construct these hyperedges, we introduce a novel acceleration-fallback cutoff for hierarchical clustering, which adaptively determines the level of granularity. Experiments on three benchmarks (Lap14, Rest14, MAMS) show consistent improvements over strong graph baselines, with substantial gains when paired with RoBERTa backbones. These results position dynamic hypergraph construction as an efficient, powerful alternative for ABSA, with potential extensions to other short-text NLP tasks.

Story understanding and analysis have long been challenging areas within Natural Language Understanding. Automated narrative analysis requires deep computational semantic representations along with syntactic processing. Moreover, the large volume of narrative data demands automated semantic analysis and computational learning rather than manual analytical approaches. In this paper, we propose a framework that analyzes the sentiment arcs of movie scripts and performs extended analysis related to the context of the characters involved. The framework enables the extraction of high-level and low-level concepts conveyed through the narrative. Using dictionary-based sentiment analysis, our approach applies a custom lexicon built with the LabMTsimple storylab module. The custom lexicon is based on the Valence, Arousal, and Dominance scores from the NRC-VAD dataset. Furthermore, the framework advances the analysis by clustering similar sentiment plots using Wards hierarchical clustering technique. Experimental evaluation on a movie dataset shows that the resulting analysis is helpful to consumers and readers when selecting a narrative or story.

Topic modelling in Natural Language Processing uncovers hidden topics in large, unlabelled text datasets. It is widely applied in fields such as information retrieval, content summarisation, and trend analysis across various disciplines. However, probabilistic topic models can produce different results when rerun due to their stochastic nature, leading to inconsistencies in latent topics. Factors like corpus shuffling, rare text removal, and document elimination contribute to these variations. This instability affects replicability, reliability, and interpretation, raising concerns about whether topic models capture meaningful topics or just noise. To address these problems, we defined a new stability measure that incorporates accuracy and consistency and uses the generative properties of LDA to generate a new corpus with ground truth. These generated corpora are run through LDA 50 times to determine the variability in the output. We show that LDA can correctly determine the underlying number of topics in the documents. We also find that LDA is more internally consistent, as the multiple reruns return similar topics; however, these topics are not the true topics.

The hospitality industry in the Arab world increasingly relies on customer feedback to shape services, driving the need for advanced Arabic sentiment analysis tools. To address this challenge, the Sentiment Analysis on Arabic Dialects in the Hospitality Domain shared task focuses on Sentiment Detection in Arabic Dialects. This task leverages a multi-dialect, manually curated dataset derived from hotel reviews originally written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and translated into Saudi and Moroccan (Darija) dialects. The dataset consists of 538 sentiment-balanced reviews spanning positive, neutral, and negative categories. Translations were validated by native speakers to ensure dialectal accuracy and sentiment preservation. This resource supports the development of dialect-aware NLP systems for real-world applications in customer experience analysis. More than 40 teams have registered for the shared task, with 12 submitting systems during the evaluation phase. The top-performing system achieved an F1 score of 0.81, demonstrating the feasibility and ongoing challenges of sentiment analysis across Arabic dialects.

Understanding sentiment in financial documents is crucial for gaining insights into market behavior. These reports often contain obfuscated language designed to present a positive or neutral outlook, even when underlying conditions may be less favorable. This paper presents a novel approach using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to decode obfuscated sentiment in Thai financial annual reports. We develop specific guidelines for annotating obfuscated sentiment in these texts and annotate more than one hundred financial reports. We then benchmark various text classification models on this annotated dataset, demonstrating strong performance in sentiment classification. Additionally, we conduct an event study to evaluate the real-world implications of our sentiment analysis on stock prices. Our results suggest that market reactions are selectively influenced by specific aspects within the reports. Our findings underscore the complexity of sentiment analysis in financial texts and highlight the importance of addressing obfuscated language to accurately assess market sentiment.

Dialogue models falter in noisy, multi-speaker environments, often producing irrelevant responses and awkward turn-taking. We present AV-Dialog, the first multimodal dialog framework that uses both audio and visual cues to track the target speaker, predict turn-taking, and generate coherent responses. By combining acoustic tokenization with multi-task, multi-stage training on monadic, synthetic, and real audio-visual dialogue datasets, AV-Dialog achieves robust streaming transcription, semantically grounded turn-boundary detection and accurate responses, resulting in a natural conversational flow. Experiments show that AV-Dialog outperforms audio-only models under interference, reducing transcription errors, improving turn-taking prediction, and enhancing human-rated dialogue quality. These results highlight the power of seeing as well as hearing for speaker-aware interaction, paving the way for {spoken} dialogue agents that perform {robustly} in real-world, noisy environments.

Multilingual topic models can reveal patterns in cross-lingual document collections.

Topic models are becoming increasingly relevant probabilistic models for dimensionality reduction of text data, inferring topics that capture meaningful themes of frequently co-occurring terms. We formulate topic modelling as an information retrieval task, where the goal is, based on the latent topic representation, to capture relevant term co-occurrence patterns. We evaluate performance for this task rigorously with regard to two types of errors, false negatives and positives, based on the well-known precision-recall trade-off and provide a statistical model that allows the user to balance between the contributions of the different error types. When the user focuses solely on the contribution of false negatives ignoring false positives altogether our proposed model reduces to a standard topic model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed approach is effective and infers more coherent topics than existing related approaches.