Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This balance theory suggests that people prefer works that are familiar, but not so familiar as to be boring; novel, but not so novel as to violate the expectations of their genre. We test this idea using a large dataset of fanfiction. We apply a multiple regression model and a generalized additive model to examine how the recognition a work receives varies with its novelty, estimated through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model, in the context of existing works. We find the opposite pattern of what the balance theory predicts$\unicode{x2014}$overall success decline almost monotonically with novelty and exhibits a U-shaped, instead of an inverse U-shaped, curve. This puzzle is resolved by teasing out two competing forces: sameness attracts the mass whereas novelty provides enjoyment. Taken together, even though the balance theory holds in terms of expressed enjoyment, the overall success can show the opposite pattern due to the dominant role of sameness to attract the audience. Under these two forces, cultural evolution may have to work against inertia$\unicode{x2014}$the appetite for consuming the familiar$\unicode{x2014}$and may resemble a punctuated equilibrium, marked by occasional leaps.

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal task in the domain of natural language processing. It encompasses both text-level sentiment polarity classification and word-level Part of Speech(POS) sentiment polarity determination. Such analysis challenges models to understand text holistically while also extracting nuanced information. With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), new avenues for sentiment analysis have opened. This paper proposes enhancing performance by leveraging the Mutual Reinforcement Effect(MRE) between individual words and the overall text. It delves into how word polarity influences the overarching sentiment of a passage. To support our research, we annotated four novel Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech(SCPOS) datasets, building upon existing sentiment classification datasets. Furthermore, we developed a Universal Sentiment Analysis(USA) model, with a 7-billion parameter size. Experimental results revealed that our model surpassed the performance of gpt-3.5-turbo across all four datasets, underscoring the significance of MRE in sentiment analysis.

There is a lack of quantitative measures to evaluate the progression of topics through time in dynamic topic models (DTMs). Filling this gap, we propose a novel evaluation measure for DTMs that analyzes the changes in the quality of each topic over time. Additionally, we propose an extension combining topic quality with the model's temporal consistency. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed measure by applying it to synthetic data and data from existing DTMs. We also conducted a human evaluation, which indicates that the proposed measure correlates well with human judgment. Our findings may help in identifying changing topics, evaluating different DTMs, and guiding future research in this area.

As an application domain where the slightest qualitative improvements can yield immense value, finance is a promising candidate for early quantum advantage. Focusing on the rapidly advancing field of Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP), we explore the practical applicability of the two central approaches DisCoCat and Quantum-Enhanced Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) to the problem of sentiment analysis in finance. Utilizing a novel ChatGPT-based data generation approach, we conduct a case study with more than 1000 realistic sentences and find that QLSTMs can be trained substantially faster than DisCoCat while also achieving close to classical results for their available software implementations.

This paper summarizes the results of experimenting with Universal Dependencies (UD) adaptation of an Unsupervised, Compositional and Recursive (UCR) rule-based approach for Sentiment Analysis (SA) submitted to the Shared Task at Rest-Mex 2023 (Team Olga/LyS-SALSA) (within the IberLEF 2023 conference). By using basic syntactic rules such as rules of modification and negation applied on words from sentiment dictionaries, our approach exploits some advantages of an unsupervised method for SA: (1) interpretability and explainability of SA, (2) robustness across datasets, languages and domains and (3) usability by non-experts in NLP. We compare our approach with other unsupervised approaches of SA that in contrast to our UCR rule-based approach use simple heuristic rules to deal with negation and modification. Our results show a considerable improvement over these approaches. We discuss future improvements of our results by using modality features as another shifting rule of polarity and word disambiguation techniques to identify the right sentiment words.

Advancements in conversational systems have revolutionized information access, surpassing the limitations of single queries. However, developing dialogue systems requires a large amount of training data, which is a challenge in low-resource domains and languages. Traditional data collection methods like crowd-sourcing are labor-intensive and time-consuming, making them ineffective in this context. Data augmentation (DA) is an affective approach to alleviate the data scarcity problem in conversational systems. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of DA approaches in the context of conversational systems. It highlights recent advances in conversation augmentation, open domain and task-oriented conversation generation, and different paradigms of evaluating these models. We also discuss current challenges and future directions in order to help researchers and practitioners to further advance the field in this area.

In this paper we present a technique of NLP to tackle the problem of inference relation (NLI) between pairs of sentences in a target language of choice without a language-specific training dataset. We exploit a generic translation dataset, manually translated, along with two instances of the same pre-trained model - the first to generate sentence embeddings for the source language, and the second fine-tuned over the target language to mimic the first. This technique is known as Knowledge Distillation. The model has been evaluated over machine translated Stanford NLI test dataset, machine translated Multi-Genre NLI test dataset, and manually translated RTE3-ITA test dataset. We also test the proposed architecture over different tasks to empirically demonstrate the generality of the NLI task. The model has been evaluated over the native Italian ABSITA dataset, on the tasks of Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, and Topic Recognition. We emphasise the generality and exploitability of the Knowledge Distillation technique that outperforms other methodologies based on machine translation, even though the former was not directly trained on the data it was tested over.

Sentiment analysis is a crucial task that aims to understand people's emotional states and predict emotional categories based on multimodal information. It consists of several subtasks, such as emotion recognition in conversation (ERC), aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), and multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA). However, unifying all subtasks in sentiment analysis presents numerous challenges, including modality alignment, unified input/output forms, and dataset bias. To address these challenges, we propose a Task-Specific Prompt method to jointly model subtasks and introduce a multimodal generative framework called UniSA. Additionally, we organize the benchmark datasets of main subtasks into a new Sentiment Analysis Evaluation benchmark, SAEval. We design novel pre-training tasks and training methods to enable the model to learn generic sentiment knowledge among subtasks to improve the model's multimodal sentiment perception ability. Our experimental results show that UniSA performs comparably to the state-of-the-art on all subtasks and generalizes well to various subtasks in sentiment analysis.

The successful application of large pre-trained models such as BERT in natural language processing has attracted more attention from researchers. Since the BERT typically acts as an end-to-end black box, classification systems based on it usually have difficulty in interpretation and low robustness. This paper proposes a visual interpretation-based self-improving classification model with a combination of virtual adversarial training (VAT) and BERT models to address the above problems. Specifically, a fine-tuned BERT model is used as a classifier to classify the sentiment of the text. Then, the predicted sentiment classification labels are used as part of the input of another BERT for spam classification via a semi-supervised training manner using VAT. Additionally, visualization techniques, including visualizing the importance of words and normalizing the attention head matrix, are employed to analyze the relevance of each component to classification accuracy. Moreover, brand-new features will be found in the visual analysis, and classification performance will be improved. Experimental results on Twitter's tweet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on the classification task. Furthermore, the ablation study results illustrate the effect of different components of the proposed model on the classification results.

The capabilities and use cases of automatic natural language processing (NLP) have grown significantly over the last few years. While much work has been devoted to understanding how humans deal with discourse connectives, this phenomenon is understudied in computational systems. Therefore, it is important to put NLP models under the microscope and examine whether they can adequately comprehend, process, and reason within the complexity of natural language. In this chapter, we introduce the main mechanisms behind automatic sentence processing systems step by step and then focus on evaluating discourse connective processing. We assess nine popular systems in their ability to understand English discourse connectives and analyze how context and language understanding tasks affect their connective comprehension. The results show that NLP systems do not process all discourse connectives equally well and that the computational processing complexity of different connective kinds is not always consistently in line with the presumed complexity order found in human processing. In addition, while humans are more inclined to be influenced during the reading procedure but not necessarily in the final comprehension performance, discourse connectives have a significant impact on the final accuracy of NLP systems. The richer knowledge of connectives a system learns, the more negative effect inappropriate connectives have on it. This suggests that the correct explicitation of discourse connectives is important for computational natural language processing.