Existing studies on multimodal sentiment analysis heavily rely on textual modality and unavoidably induce the spurious correlations between textual words and sentiment labels. This greatly hinders the model generalization ability. To address this problem, we define the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal sentiment analysis. This task aims to estimate and mitigate the bad effect of textual modality for strong OOD generalization. To this end, we embrace causal inference, which inspects the causal relationships via a causal graph. From the graph, we find that the spurious correlations are attributed to the direct effect of textual modality on the model prediction while the indirect one is more reliable by considering multimodal semantics. Inspired by this, we devise a model-agnostic counterfactual framework for multimodal sentiment analysis, which captures the direct effect of textual modality via an extra text model and estimates the indirect one by a multimodal model. During the inference, we first estimate the direct effect by the counterfactual inference, and then subtract it from the total effect of all modalities to obtain the indirect effect for reliable prediction. Extensive experiments show the superior effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed framework.

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study on the continuously generating Big Data on Twitter related to the sharing of information, news, views, opinions, ideas, feedback, and experiences about the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the Omicron variant, which is the globally dominant variant of SARS-CoV-2 at this time. A total of 12028 tweets about the Omicron variant were studied, and the specific characteristics of tweets that were analyzed include - sentiment, language, source, type, and embedded URLs. The findings of this study are manifold. First, from sentiment analysis, it was observed that 50.5% of tweets had a neutral emotion. The other emotions - bad, good, terrible, and great were found in 15.6%, 14.0%, 12.5%, and 7.5% of the tweets, respectively. Second, the findings of language interpretation showed that 65.9% of the tweets were posted in English. It was followed by Spanish, French, Italian, and other languages. Third, the findings from source tracking showed that Twitter for Android was associated with 35.2% of tweets. It was followed by Twitter Web App, Twitter for iPhone, Twitter for iPad, and other sources. Fourth, studying the type of tweets revealed that retweets accounted for 60.8% of the tweets, it was followed by original tweets and replies that accounted for 19.8% and 19.4% of the tweets, respectively. Fifth, in terms of embedded URL analysis, the most common domain embedded in the tweets was found to be twitter.com, which was followed by biorxiv.org, nature.com, and other domains. Finally, to support similar research in this field, we have developed a Twitter dataset that comprises more than 500,000 tweets about the SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant since the first detected case of this variant on November 24, 2021.

Crises such as natural disasters, global pandemics, and social unrest continuously threaten our world and emotionally affect millions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding emotions that people express during large-scale crises helps inform policy makers and first responders about the emotional states of the population as well as provide emotional support to those who need such support. We present CovidEmo, ~3K English tweets labeled with emotions and temporally distributed across 18 months. Our analyses reveal the emotional toll caused by COVID-19, and changes of the social narrative and associated emotions over time. Motivated by the time-sensitive nature of crises and the cost of large-scale annotation efforts, we examine how well large pre-trained language models generalize across domains and timeline in the task of perceived emotion prediction in the context of COVID-19. Our analyses suggest that cross-domain information transfers occur, yet there are still significant gaps. We propose semi-supervised learning as a way to bridge this gap, obtaining significantly better performance using unlabeled data from the target domain.

Discovering what other people think has always been a key aspect of our information-gathering strategy. People can now actively utilize information technology to seek out and comprehend the ideas of others, thanks to the increased availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs. Because of its crucial function in understanding people's opinions, sentiment analysis (SA) is a crucial task. Existing research, on the other hand, is primarily focused on the English language, with just a small amount of study devoted to low-resource languages. For sentiment analysis, this work presented a new multi-class Urdu dataset based on user evaluations. The tweeter website was used to get Urdu dataset. Our proposed dataset includes 10,000 reviews that have been carefully classified into two categories by human experts: positive, negative. The primary purpose of this research is to construct a manually annotated dataset for Urdu sentiment analysis and to establish the baseline result. Five different lexicon- and rule-based algorithms including Naivebayes, Stanza, Textblob, Vader, and Flair are employed and the experimental results show that Flair with an accuracy of 70% outperforms other tested algorithms.

Collaborative Filtering(CF) recommender is a crucial application in the online market and ecommerce. However, CF recommender has been proven to suffer from persistent problems related to sparsity of the user rating that will further lead to a cold-start issue. Existing methods address the data sparsity issue by applying token-level sentiment analysis that translate text review into sentiment scores as a complement of the user rating. In this paper, we attempt to optimize the sentiment analysis with advanced NLP models including BERT and RoBERTa, and experiment on whether the CF recommender has been further enhanced. We build the recommenders on the Amazon US Reviews dataset, and tune the pretrained BERT and RoBERTa with the traditional fine-tuned paradigm as well as the new prompt-based learning paradigm. Experimental result shows that the recommender enhanced with the sentiment ratings predicted by the fine-tuned RoBERTa has the best performance, and achieved 30.7% overall gain by comparing MAP, NDCG and precision at K to the baseline recommender. Prompt-based learning paradigm, although superior to traditional fine-tune paradigm in pure sentiment analysis, fail to further improve the CF recommender.

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Prompt tuning has been an extremely effective tool to adapt a pre-trained model to downstream tasks. However, standard prompt-based methods mainly consider the case of sufficient data of downstream tasks. It is still unclear whether the advantage can be transferred to the few-shot regime, where only limited data are available for each downstream task. Although some works have demonstrated the potential of prompt-tuning under the few-shot setting, the main stream methods via searching discrete prompts or tuning soft prompts with limited data are still very challenging. Through extensive empirical studies, we find that there is still a gap between prompt tuning and fully fine-tuning for few-shot learning. To bridge the gap, we propose a new prompt-tuning framework, called Soft Template Tuning (STT). STT combines manual and auto prompts, and treats downstream classification tasks as a masked language modeling task. Comprehensive evaluation on different settings suggests STT can close the gap between fine-tuning and prompt-based methods without introducing additional parameters. Significantly, it can even outperform the time- and resource-consuming fine-tuning method on sentiment classification tasks.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at predicting sentiment polarity (SC) or extracting opinion span (OE) expressed towards a given aspect. Previous work in ABSA mostly relies on rather complicated aspect-specific feature induction. Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs), e.g., BERT, have been used as context modeling layers to simplify the feature induction structures and achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, such PLM-based context modeling can be not that aspect-specific. Therefore, a key question is left under-explored: how the aspect-specific context can be better modeled through PLMs? To answer the question, we attempt to enhance aspect-specific context modeling with PLM in a non-intrusive manner. We propose three aspect-specific input transformations, namely aspect companion, aspect prompt, and aspect marker. Informed by these transformations, non-intrusive aspect-specific PLMs can be achieved to promote the PLM to pay more attention to the aspect-specific context in a sentence. Additionally, we craft an adversarial benchmark for ABSA (advABSA) to see how aspect-specific modeling can impact model robustness. Extensive experimental results on standard and adversarial benchmarks for SC and OE demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, yielding new state-of-the-art performance on OE and competitive performance on SC.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to align aspects and corresponding sentiments for aspect-specific sentiment polarity inference. It is challenging because a sentence may contain multiple aspects or complicated (e.g., conditional, coordinating, or adversative) relations. Recently, exploiting dependency syntax information with graph neural networks has been the most popular trend. Despite its success, methods that heavily rely on the dependency tree pose challenges in accurately modeling the alignment of the aspects and their words indicative of sentiment, since the dependency tree may provide noisy signals of unrelated associations (e.g., the "conj" relation between "great" and "dreadful" in Figure 2). In this paper, to alleviate this problem, we propose a Bi-Syntax aware Graph Attention Network (BiSyn-GAT+). Specifically, BiSyn-GAT+ fully exploits the syntax information (e.g., phrase segmentation and hierarchical structure) of the constituent tree of a sentence to model the sentiment-aware context of every single aspect (called intra-context) and the sentiment relations across aspects (called inter-context) for learning. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that BiSyn-GAT+ outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

Building document-grounded dialogue systems have received growing interest as documents convey a wealth of human knowledge and commonly exist in enterprises. Wherein, how to comprehend and retrieve information from documents is a challenging research problem. Previous work ignores the visual property of documents and treats them as plain text, resulting in incomplete modality. In this paper, we propose a Layout-aware document-level Information Extraction dataset, LIE, to facilitate the study of extracting both structural and semantic knowledge from visually rich documents (VRDs), so as to generate accurate responses in dialogue systems. LIE contains 62k annotations of three extraction tasks from 4,061 pages in product and official documents, becoming the largest VRD-based information extraction dataset to the best of our knowledge. We also develop benchmark methods that extend the token-based language model to consider layout features like humans. Empirical results show that layout is critical for VRD-based extraction, and system demonstration also verifies that the extracted knowledge can help locate the answers that users care about.