Detecting dialogue breakdown in real time is critical for conversational AI systems, because it enables taking corrective action to successfully complete a task. In spoken dialog systems, this breakdown can be caused by a variety of unexpected situations including high levels of background noise, causing STT mistranscriptions, or unexpected user flows. In particular, industry settings like healthcare, require high precision and high flexibility to navigate differently based on the conversation history and dialogue states. This makes it both more challenging and more critical to accurately detect dialog breakdown. To accurately detect breakdown, we found it requires processing audio inputs along with downstream NLP model inferences on transcribed text in real time. In this paper, we introduce a Multimodal Contextual Dialogue Breakdown (MultConDB) model. This model significantly outperforms other known best models by achieving an F1 of 69.27.

Despite the many recent achievements in developing and deploying social robotics, there are still many underexplored environments and applications for which systematic evaluation of such systems by end-users is necessary. While several robotic platforms have been used in gerontological healthcare, the question of whether or not a social interactive robot with multi-modal conversational capabilities will be useful and accepted in real-life facilities is yet to be answered. This paper is an attempt to partially answer this question, via two waves of experiments with patients and companions in a day-care gerontological facility in Paris with a full-sized humanoid robot endowed with social and conversational interaction capabilities. The software architecture, developed during the H2020 SPRING project, together with the experimental protocol, allowed us to evaluate the acceptability (AES) and usability (SUS) with more than 60 end-users. Overall, the users are receptive to this technology, especially when the robot perception and action skills are robust to environmental clutter and flexible to handle a plethora of different interactions.

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) is an indispensable and highly challenging task in natural language processing. Current efforts have focused on specific sub-tasks, making it difficult to comprehensively cover all sub-tasks within the ABSA domain. With the development of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs), there came inspiration for a one-stop solution to sentiment analysis. In this study, we used GPTs for all sub-tasks of few-shot ABSA while defining a general learning paradigm for this application. We propose the All in One (AiO) model, a simple yet effective two-stage model for all ABSA sub-tasks. In the first stage, a specific backbone network learns the semantic information of the review and generates heuristically enhanced candidates. In the second stage, AiO leverages GPT contextual learning capabilities to generate predictions. The study conducted comprehensive comparative and ablation experiments on five benchmark datasets, and the results show that AiO can effectively handle all ABSA sub-tasks, even with few-shot data.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has innovated the development of dialog agents. Specially, a well-trained LLM, as a central process unit, is capable of providing fluent and reasonable response for user's request. Besides, auxiliary tools such as external knowledge retrieval, personalized character for vivid response, short/long-term memory for ultra long context management are developed, completing the usage experience for LLM-based dialog agents. However, the above-mentioned techniques does not solve the issue of \textbf{personalization from user perspective}: agents response in a same fashion to different users, without consideration of their features, such as habits, interests and past experience. In another words, current implementation of dialog agents fail in ``knowing the user''. The capacity of well-description and representation of user is under development. In this work, we proposed a framework for dialog agent to incorporate user profiling (initialization, update): user's query and response is analyzed and organized into a structural user profile, which is latter served to provide personal and more precise response. Besides, we proposed a series of evaluation protocols for personalization: to what extend the response is personal to the different users. The framework is named as \method{}, inspired by inscription of ``Know Yourself'' in the temple of Apollo (also known as \method{}) in Ancient Greek. Few works have been conducted on incorporating personalization into LLM, \method{} is a pioneer work on guiding LLM's response to meet individuation via the application of dialog agents, with a set of evaluation methods for measurement in personalization.

Sentiment analysis has become increasingly important in healthcare, especially in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields. The data generated by the general public on the effectiveness, side effects, and adverse drug reactions are goldmines for different agencies and medicine producers to understand the concerns and reactions of people. Despite the challenge of obtaining datasets on drug-related problems, sentiment analysis on this topic would be a significant boon to the field. This project proposes a drug review classification system that classifies user reviews on a particular drug into different classes, such as positive, negative, and neutral. This approach uses a dataset that is collected from publicly available sources containing drug reviews, such as drugs.com. The collected data is manually labeled and verified manually to ensure that the labels are correct. Three pre-trained language models, such as BERT, SciBERT, and BioBERT, are used to obtain embeddings, which were later used as features to different machine learning classifiers such as decision trees, support vector machines, random forests, and also deep learning algorithms such as recurrent neural networks. The performance of these classifiers is quantified using precision, recall, and f1-score, and the results show that the proposed approaches are useful in analyzing the sentiments of people on different drugs.

In this paper, we extend financial sentiment analysis~(FSA) to event-level since events usually serve as the subject of the sentiment in financial text. Though extracting events from the financial text may be conducive to accurate sentiment predictions, it has specialized challenges due to the lengthy and discontinuity of events in a financial text. To this end, we reconceptualize the event extraction as a classification task by designing a categorization comprising coarse-grained and fine-grained event categories. Under this setting, we formulate the \textbf{E}vent-Level \textbf{F}inancial \textbf{S}entiment \textbf{A}nalysis~(\textbf{EFSA} for short) task that outputs quintuples consisting of (company, industry, coarse-grained event, fine-grained event, sentiment) from financial text. A large-scale Chinese dataset containing $12,160$ news articles and $13,725$ quintuples is publicized as a brand new testbed for our task. A four-hop Chain-of-Thought LLM-based approach is devised for this task. Systematically investigations are conducted on our dataset, and the empirical results demonstrate the benchmarking scores of existing methods and our proposed method can reach the current state-of-the-art. Our dataset and framework implementation are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EFSA-645E

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

Existing discourse corpora are annotated based on different frameworks, which show significant dissimilarities in definitions of arguments and relations and structural constraints. Despite surface differences, these frameworks share basic understandings of discourse relations. The relationship between these frameworks has been an open research question, especially the correlation between relation inventories utilized in different frameworks. Better understanding of this question is helpful for integrating discourse theories and enabling interoperability of discourse corpora annotated under different frameworks. However, studies that explore correlations between discourse relation inventories are hindered by different criteria of discourse segmentation, and expert knowledge and manual examination are typically needed. Some semi-automatic methods have been proposed, but they rely on corpora annotated in multiple frameworks in parallel. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatic approach to address the challenges. Specifically, we extend the label-anchored contrastive learning method introduced by Zhang et al. (2022b) to learn label embeddings during a classification task. These embeddings are then utilized to map discourse relations from different frameworks. We show experimental results on RST-DT (Carlson et al., 2001) and PDTB 3.0 (Prasad et al., 2018).

This paper explores the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and financial analysis, focusing on the impact of sentiment analysis in stock price prediction. We employ BERTopic, an advanced NLP technique, to analyze the sentiment of topics derived from stock market comments. Our methodology integrates this sentiment analysis with various deep learning models, renowned for their effectiveness in time series and stock prediction tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that incorporating topic sentiment notably enhances the performance of these models. The results indicate that topics in stock market comments provide implicit, valuable insights into stock market volatility and price trends. This study contributes to the field by showcasing the potential of NLP in enriching financial analysis and opens up avenues for further research into real-time sentiment analysis and the exploration of emotional and contextual aspects of market sentiment. The integration of advanced NLP techniques like BERTopic with traditional financial analysis methods marks a step forward in developing more sophisticated tools for understanding and predicting market behaviors.