Pratik N. Kalamkar, Anupama G. Phakatkar Abstract -- Opinion mining, also called sentiment analysis, is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions towards entities such as products, services, organizations, individuals, issues, events, topics, and their attributes. Holistic lexicon - based approach do es not consider the strength of each opinion, i.e., whether the opinion is very strongly negative (or positive), strongly negative (or positive), moderate negative (or positive), very weakly negative (or positive) and weakly negative (or positive). In this paper, we propose approach to rank entities based on orientation and strength of the entity's reviews and user's queries by classifying them in granularity levels (i.e. We shall use fuzzy logic algorithmic approach in order to classify opinion words into different category and syntactic dependency resolution to find relations for de sired aspect words . Opinion words related to certain aspects of interest are considered to find the entity score for that aspect in the review.

ABSTRACT The growing prevalence of multimodal image-text sarcasm on social media poses challenges for opinion mining systems. Existing approaches rely on full fine-tuning of large models, making them unsuitable to adapt under resource-constrained settings. While recent parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods offer promise, their off-the-shelf use underperforms on complex tasks like sarcasm detection. We propose AdS-CLIP (Adapter-state Sharing in CLIP), a lightweight framework built on CLIP that inserts adapters only in the upper layers to preserve low-level unimodal representations in the lower layers and introduces a novel adapter-state sharing mechanism, where textual adapters guide visual ones to promote efficient cross-modal learning in the upper layers. Experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that AdS-CLIP not only outperforms standard PEFT methods but also existing multimodal baselines with significantly fewer trainable parameters.

Sarcasm is a complex form of figurative language in which the intended meaning contradicts the literal one. Its prevalence in social media and popular culture poses persistent challenges for natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, and content moderation. With the emergence of multimodal large language models, sarcasm detection extends beyond text and requires integrating cues from audio and vision. We present MuSaG, the first German multimodal sarcasm detection dataset, consisting of 33 minutes of manually selected and human-annotated statements from German television shows. Each instance provides aligned text, audio, and video modalities, annotated separately by humans, enabling evaluation in unimodal and multimodal settings. We benchmark nine open-source and commercial models, spanning text, audio, vision, and multimodal architectures, and compare their performance to human annotations. Our results show that while humans rely heavily on audio in conversational settings, models perform best on text. This highlights a gap in current multimodal models and motivates the use of MuSaG for developing models better suited to realistic scenarios. We release MuSaG publicly to support future research on multimodal sarcasm detection and human-model alignment.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by jointly analyzing data from multiple modalities typically text and images offering a richer and more accurate interpretation than unimodal approaches. In this paper, we first propose BERT-ViT-EF, a novel model that combines powerful Transformer-based encoders BERT for textual input and ViT for visual input through an early fusion strategy. This approach facilitates deeper cross-modal interactions and more effective joint representation learning. To further enhance the model's capability, we propose an extension called the Dual Transformer Contrastive Network (DTCN), which builds upon BERT-ViT-EF. DTCN incorporates an additional Transformer encoder layer after BERT to refine textual context (before fusion) and employs contrastive learning to align text and image representations, fostering robust multimodal feature learning. Empirical results on two widely used MSA benchmarks MVSA-Single and TumEmo demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. DTCN achieves best accuracy (78.4%) and F1-score (78.3%) on TumEmo, and delivers competitive performance on MVSA-Single, with 76.6% accuracy and 75.9% F1-score. These improvements highlight the benefits of early fusion and deeper contextual modeling in Transformer-based multimodal sentiment analysis.

Opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. In current times due to growth of social networking website and increase in number of e-commerce site huge amount of opinions are now available on web. Given a set of evaluative statements that contain opinions (or sentiments) about an Entity, opinion mining aims to extract attributes and components of the object that have been commented on in each statement and to determine whether the comments are positive, negative or neutral. While lot of research recently has been done in field of opinion mining and some of it dealing with ranking of entities based on review or opinion set, classifying opinions into finer granularity level and then ranking entities has never been done before. In this paper method for opinion mining from statements at a deeper level of granularity is proposed. This is done by using fuzzy logic reasoning, after which entities are ranked as per this information.

Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction that is often overlooked in favor of purely functional capabilities like reasoning and question answering. To address this limitation, we introduce UltraVoice, the first large-scale speech dialogue dataset engineered for multiple fine-grained speech style control. Encompassing over 830 hours of speech dialogues, UltraVoice provides instructions across six key speech stylistic dimensions: emotion, speed, volume, accent, language, and composite styles. Fine-tuning leading models such as SLAM-Omni and VocalNet on UltraVoice significantly enhances their fine-grained speech stylistic controllability without degrading core conversational abilities. Specifically, our fine-tuned models achieve improvements of 29.12-42.33% in Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and 14.61-40.09 percentage points in Instruction Following Rate (IFR) on multi-dimensional control tasks designed in the UltraVoice. Moreover, on the URO-Bench benchmark, our fine-tuned models demonstrate substantial gains in core understanding, reasoning, and conversational abilities, with average improvements of +10.84% on the Basic setting and +7.87% on the Pro setting. Furthermore, the dataset's utility extends to training controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) models, underscoring its high quality and broad applicability for expressive speech synthesis. The complete dataset and model checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/bigai-nlco/UltraVoice.

Developing benchmark datasets for low-resource languages poses significant challenges, primarily due to the limited availability of native linguistic experts and the substantial time and cost involved in annotation. Given these challenges, Maithili is still underrepresented in natural language processing research. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 13 million people in the Purvanchal region of India, valued for its rich linguistic structure and cultural significance. While sentiment analysis has achieved remarkable progress in high-resource languages, resources for low-resource languages, such as Maithili, remain scarce, often restricted to coarse-grained annotations and lacking interpretability mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel dataset comprising 3,221 Maithili sentences annotated for sentiment polarity and accompanied by natural language justifications. Moreover, the dataset is carefully curated and validated by linguistic experts to ensure both label reliability and contextual fidelity. Notably, the justifications are written in Maithili, thereby promoting culturally grounded interpretation and enhancing the explainability of sentiment models. Furthermore, extensive experiments using both classical machine learning and state-of-the-art transformer architectures demonstrate the dataset's effectiveness for interpretable sentiment analysis. Ultimately, this work establishes the first benchmark for explainable affective computing in Maithili, thus contributing a valuable resource to the broader advancement of multilingual NLP and explainable AI.

This study presents a framework for automated evaluation of dynamically evolving topic models using Large Language Models (LLMs). Topic modeling is essential for organizing and retrieving scholarly content in digital library systems, helping users navigate complex and evolving knowledge domains. However, widely used automated metrics, such as coherence and diversity, often capture only narrow statistical patterns and fail to explain semantic failures in practice. We introduce a purpose-oriented evaluation framework that employs nine LLM-based metrics spanning four key dimensions of topic quality: lexical validity, intra-topic semantic soundness, inter-topic structural soundness, and document-topic alignment soundness. The framework is validated through adversarial and sampling-based protocols, and is applied across datasets spanning news articles, scholarly publications, and social media posts, as well as multiple topic modeling methods and open-source LLMs. Our analysis shows that LLM-based metrics provide interpretable, robust, and task-relevant assessments, uncovering critical weaknesses in topic models such as redundancy and semantic drift, which are often missed by traditional metrics. These results support the development of scalable, fine-grained evaluation tools for maintaining topic relevance in dynamic datasets. All code and data supporting this work are accessible at https://github.com/zhiyintan/topic-model-LLMjudgment.

In conversation, humans use multimodal cues, such as speech, gestures, and gaze, to manage turn-taking. While linguistic and acoustic features are informative, gestures provide complementary cues for modeling these transitions. To study this, we introduce DnD Gesture++, an extension of the multi-party DnD Gesture corpus enriched with 2,663 semantic gesture annotations spanning iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and discourse types. Using this dataset, we model turn-taking prediction through a Mixture-of-Experts framework integrating text, audio, and gestures. Experiments show that incorporating semantically guided gestures yields consistent performance gains over baselines, demonstrating their complementary role in multimodal turn-taking.

Online topic models are unsupervised algorithms to identify latent topics in data streams that continuously evolve over time. Although these methods naturally align with real-world scenarios, they have received considerably less attention from the community compared to their offline counterparts, due to specific additional challenges. To tackle these issues, we present SB-SETM, an innovative model extending the Embedded Topic Model (ETM) to process data streams by merging models formed on successive partial document batches. To this end, SB-SETM (i) leverages a truncated stick-breaking construction for the topic-per-document distribution, enabling the model to automatically infer from the data the appropriate number of active topics at each timestep; and (ii) introduces a merging strategy for topic embed-dings based on a continuous formulation of optimal transport adapted to the high dimensionality of the latent topic space. Numerical experiments show SB-SETM outperforming baselines on simulated scenarios. We extensively test it on a real-world corpus of news articles covering the Russian-Ukrainian war throughout 2022-2023.