Multimodal sentiment analysis and depression estimation are two important research topics that aim to predict human mental states using multimodal data. Previous research has focused on developing effective fusion strategies for exchanging and integrating mind-related information from different modalities. Some MLP-based techniques have recently achieved considerable success in a variety of computer vision tasks. Inspired by this, we explore multimodal approaches with a feature-mixing perspective in this study. To this end, we introduce CubeMLP, a multimodal feature processing framework based entirely on MLP. CubeMLP consists of three independent MLP units, each of which has two affine transformations. CubeMLP accepts all relevant modality features as input and mixes them across three axes. After extracting the characteristics using CubeMLP, the mixed multimodal features are flattened for task predictions. Our experiments are conducted on sentiment analysis datasets: CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, and depression estimation dataset: AVEC2019. The results show that CubeMLP can achieve state-of-the-art performance with a much lower computing cost.

Social media platforms have become a place where users collaborate, share their ideas and also have conflicts (Hansson et al., 2019; Hansson and Ludwig, 2019). With 126 million active daily users (Shaban, 2019), Twitter is the dominant microblogging platform on which users discuss a breadth of subjects and even play a role in influencing current trends. Users on Twitter post short and often informal messages (tweets) in which they share information and project opinions and sentiments about what is going on in the world. Twitter has been a major platform for sharing scholarly articles, and many researchers have used it to develop various metrics for scholarly articles (Haustein, 2019). Other social media platforms like Facebook and Weibo have also been sources to study online users' responses (Kou et al., 2017). Social media platforms have become a hub where users express their opinions and emotions related to multiple fields of interest (Chatterjee et al., 2019). Researchers have studied the sentiments and emotions associated with research articles on these platforms (Freeman et al., 2019, 2020).

Emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE), as one of the derived subtasks of emotion cause analysis (ECA), shares rich inter-related features with emotion extraction (EE) and cause extraction (CE). Therefore EE and CE are frequently utilized as auxiliary tasks for better feature learning, modeled via multi-task learning (MTL) framework by prior works to achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) ECPE results. However, existing MTL-based methods either fail to simultaneously model the specific features and the interactive feature in between, or suffer from the inconsistency of label prediction. In this work, we consider addressing the above challenges for improving ECPE by performing two alignment mechanisms with a novel A^2Net model. We first propose a feature-task alignment to explicitly model the specific emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature. Besides, an inter-task alignment is implemented, in which the label distance between the ECPE and the combinations of EE&CE are learned to be narrowed for better label consistency. Evaluations of benchmarks show that our methods outperform current best-performing systems on all ECA subtasks. Further analysis proves the importance of our proposed alignment mechanisms for the task.

In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 10,000 tweets containing public reports of five COVID-19 events, including positive and negative tests, deaths, denied access to testing, claimed cures and preventions. We designed slot-filling questions for each event type and annotated a total of 31 fine-grained slots, such as the location of events, recent travel, and close contacts. We show that our corpus can support fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers to automatically extract publicly reported events and help track the spread of a new disease. We also demonstrate that, by aggregating events extracted from millions of tweets, we achieve surprisingly high precision when answering complex queries, such as "Which organizations have employees that tested positive in Philadelphia?" We will release our corpus (with user-information removed), automatic extraction models, and the corresponding knowledge base to the research community.

Purpose - To better understand the online reviews and help potential consumers, businessmen, and product manufacturers effectively obtain users' evaluation on product aspects, this paper explores the distribution regularities of user attention and sentiment toward product aspects from the temporal perspective of online reviews. Design/methodology/approach - Temporal characteristics of online reviews (purchase time, review time, and time intervals between purchase time and review time), similar attributes clustering, and attribute-level sentiment computing technologies are employed based on more than 340k smartphone reviews of three products from JD.COM (a famous online shopping platform in China) to explore the distribution regularities of user attention and sentiment toward product aspects in this article. Findings - The empirical results show that a power-law distribution can fit user attention to product aspects, and the reviews posted in short time intervals contain more product aspects. Besides, the results show that the values of user sentiment of product aspects are significantly higher/lower in short time intervals which contribute to judging the advantages and weaknesses of a product. Research limitations - The paper can't acquire online reviews for more products with temporal characteristics to verify the findings because of the restriction on reviews crawling by the shopping platforms. Originality/value -This work reveals the distribution regularities of user attention and sentiment toward product aspects, which is of great significance in assisting decision-making, optimizing review presentation, and improving the shopping experience.

[Purpose] To understand the meaning of a sentence, humans can focus on important words in the sentence, which reflects our eyes staying on each word in different gaze time or times. Thus, some studies utilize eye-tracking values to optimize the attention mechanism in deep learning models. But these studies lack to explain the rationality of this approach. Whether the attention mechanism possesses this feature of human reading needs to be explored. [Design/methodology/approach] We conducted experiments on a sentiment classification task. Firstly, we obtained eye-tracking values from two open-source eye-tracking corpora to describe the feature of human reading. Then, the machine attention values of each sentence were learned from a sentiment classification model. Finally, a comparison was conducted to analyze machine attention values and eye-tracking values. [Findings] Through experiments, we found the attention mechanism can focus on important words, such as adjectives, adverbs, and sentiment words, which are valuable for judging the sentiment of sentences on the sentiment classification task. It possesses the feature of human reading, focusing on important words in sentences when reading. Due to the insufficient learning of the attention mechanism, some words are wrongly focused. The eye-tracking values can help the attention mechanism correct this error and improve the model performance. [Originality/value] Our research not only provides a reasonable explanation for the study of using eye-tracking values to optimize the attention mechanism, but also provides new inspiration for the interpretability of attention mechanism.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which focuses on detecting the sentiment polarity towards the aspect in a sentence. However, it is always sensitive to the multi-aspect challenge, where features of multiple aspects in a sentence will affect each other. To mitigate this issue, we design a novel training framework, called Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation (C3 DA), which leverages an in-domain generator to construct more multi-aspect samples and then boosts the robustness of ABSA models via contrastive learning on these generated data. In practice, given a generative pretrained language model and some limited ABSA labeled data, we first employ some parameter-efficient approaches to perform the in-domain fine-tuning. Then, the obtained in-domain generator is used to generate the synthetic sentences from two channels, i.e., Aspect Augmentation Channel and Polarity Augmentation Channel, which generate the sentence condition on a given aspect and polarity respectively. Specifically, our C3 DA performs the sentence generation in a cross-channel manner to obtain more sentences, and proposes an Entropy-Minimization Filter to filter low-quality generated samples. Extensive experiments show that our C3 DA can outperform those baselines without any augmentations by about 1% on accuracy and Macro- F1. Code and data are released in https://github.com/wangbing1416/C3DA.

Sentiment analysis is a branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which goal is to assign sentiments or emotions to particular sentences or words. Performing this task is particularly useful for companies wishing to take into account customer feedback through chatbots or verbatim. This has been done extensively in the literature using various approaches, ranging from simple models to deep transformer neural networks. In this paper, we will tackle sentiment analysis in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Computing (NISQ) era, using the DisCoCat model of language. We will first present the basics of quantum computing and the DisCoCat model. This will enable us to define a general framework to perform NLP tasks on a quantum computer. We will then extend the two-class classification that was performed by Lorenz et al. (2021) to a four-class sentiment analysis experiment on a much larger dataset, showing the scalability of such a framework.

Document-level Sentiment Analysis (DSA) is more challenging due to vague semantic links and complicate sentiment information. Recent works have been devoted to leveraging text summarization and have achieved promising results. However, these summarization-based methods did not take full advantage of the summary including ignoring the inherent interactions between the summary and document. As a result, they limited the representation to express major points in the document, which is highly indicative of the key sentiment. In this paper, we study how to effectively generate a discriminative representation with explicit subject patterns and sentiment contexts for DSA. A Hierarchical Interaction Networks (HIN) is proposed to explore bidirectional interactions between the summary and document at multiple granularities and learn subject-oriented document representations for sentiment classification. Furthermore, we design a Sentiment-based Rethinking mechanism (SR) by refining the HIN with sentiment label information to learn a more sentiment-aware document representation. We extensively evaluate our proposed models on three public datasets. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models and show that HIN-SR outperforms various state-of-the-art methods.

As aspect-level sentiment labels are expensive and labor-intensive to acquire, zero-shot aspect-level sentiment classification is proposed to learn classifiers applicable to new domains without using any annotated aspect-level data. In contrast, document-level sentiment data with ratings are more easily accessible. In this work, we achieve zero-shot aspect-level sentiment classification by only using document-level reviews. Our key intuition is that the sentiment representation of a document is composed of the sentiment representations of all the aspects of that document. Based on this, we propose the AF-DSC method to explicitly model such sentiment composition in reviews. AF-DSC first learns sentiment representations for all potential aspects and then aggregates aspect-level sentiments into a document-level one to perform document-level sentiment classification. In this way, we obtain the aspect-level sentiment classifier as the by-product of the document-level sentiment classifier. Experimental results on aspect-level sentiment classification benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit utilization of sentiment composition in document-level sentiment classification. Our model with only 30k training data outperforms previous work utilizing millions of data.