Sentiment analysis is a field within NLP that has gained importance because it is applied in various areas such as; social media surveillance, customer feedback evaluation and market research. At the same time, distributed systems allow for effective processing of large amounts of data. Therefore, this paper examines how sentiment analysis converges with distributed systems by concentrating on different approaches, challenges and future investigations. Furthermore, we do an extensive experiment where we train sentiment analysis models using both single node configuration and distributed architecture to bring out the benefits and shortcomings of each method in terms of performance and accuracy.

Background Advances in machine learning (ML) models have increased the capability of researchers to detect vaccine hesitancy in social media using Natural Language Processing (NLP). A considerable volume of research has identified the persistence of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in discourse shared on various social media platforms. Methods Our objective in this study was to conduct a systematic review of research employing sentiment analysis or stance detection to study discourse towards COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination spread on Twitter (officially known as X since 2023). Following registration in the PROSPERO international registry of systematic reviews, we searched papers published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2023 that used supervised machine learning to assess COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through stance detection or sentiment analysis on Twitter. We categorized the studies according to a taxonomy of five dimensions: tweet sample selection approach, self-reported study type, classification typology, annotation codebook definitions, and interpretation of results. We analyzed if studies using stance detection report different hesitancy trends than those using sentiment analysis by examining how COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is measured, and whether efforts were made to avoid measurement bias. Results Our review found that measurement bias is widely prevalent in studies employing supervised machine learning to analyze sentiment and stance toward COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination. The reporting errors are sufficiently serious that they hinder the generalisability and interpretation of these studies to understanding whether individual opinions communicate reluctance to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion Improving the reporting of NLP methods is crucial to addressing knowledge gaps in vaccine hesitancy discourse.

Relation extraction (RE) is a standard information extraction task playing a major role in downstream applications such as knowledge discovery and question answering. Although decoder-only large language models are excelling in generative tasks, smaller encoder models are still the go to architecture for RE. In this paper, we revisit fine-tuning such smaller models using a novel dual-encoder architecture with a joint contrastive and cross-entropy loss. Unlike previous methods that employ a fixed linear layer for predicate representations, our approach uses a second encoder to compute instance-specific predicate representations by infusing them with real entity spans from corresponding input instances. We conducted experiments on two biomedical RE datasets and two general domain datasets. Our approach achieved F1 score improvements ranging from 1% to 2% over state-of-the-art methods with a simple but elegant formulation. Ablation studies justify the importance of various components built into the proposed architecture.

Visual question answering (VQA) has emerged as a flexible approach for extracting specific pieces of information from document images. However, existing work typically queries each field in isolation, overlooking potential dependencies across multiple items. This paper investigates the merits of extracting multiple fields jointly versus separately. Through experiments on multiple large vision language models and datasets, we show that jointly extracting fields often improves accuracy, especially when the fields share strong numeric or contextual dependencies. We further analyze how performance scales with the number of requested items and use a regression based metric to quantify inter field relationships. Our results suggest that multi field prompts can mitigate confusion arising from similar surface forms and related numeric values, providing practical methods for designing robust VQA systems in document information extraction tasks.

While sentiment analysis has advanced from sentence to aspect-level, i.e., the identification of concrete terms related to a sentiment, the equivalent field of Aspect-based Emotion Analysis (ABEA) is faced with dataset bottlenecks and the increased complexity of emotion classes in contrast to binary sentiments. This paper addresses these gaps, by generating a first ABEA training dataset, consisting of 2,621 English Tweets, and fine-tuning a BERT-based model for the ABEA sub-tasks of Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Aspect Emotion Classification (AEC). The dataset annotation process was based on the hierarchical emotion theory by Shaver et al. [1] and made use of group annotation and majority voting strategies to facilitate label consistency. The resulting dataset contained aspect-level emotion labels for Anger, Sadness, Happiness, Fear, and a None class. Using the new ABEA training dataset, the state-of-the-art ABSA model GRACE by Luo et al. [2] was fine-tuned for ABEA. The results reflected a performance plateau at an F1-score of 70.1% for ATE and 46.9% for joint ATE and AEC extraction. The limiting factors for model performance were broadly identified as the small training dataset size coupled with the increased task complexity, causing model overfitting and limited abilities to generalize well on new data.

With the massive surge in ML models on platforms like Hugging Face, users often lose track and struggle to choose the best model for their downstream tasks, frequently relying on model popularity indicated by download counts, likes, or recency. We investigate whether this popularity aligns with actual model performance and how the comprehensiveness of model documentation correlates with both popularity and performance. In our study, we evaluated a comprehensive set of 500 Sentiment Analysis models on Hugging Face. This evaluation involved massive annotation efforts, with human annotators completing nearly 80,000 annotations, alongside extensive model training and evaluation. Our findings reveal that model popularity does not necessarily correlate with performance. Additionally, we identify critical inconsistencies in model card reporting: approximately 80\% of the models analyzed lack detailed information about the model, training, and evaluation processes. Furthermore, about 88\% of model authors overstate their models' performance in the model cards. Based on our findings, we provide a checklist of guidelines for users to choose good models for downstream tasks.

With the continuous emergence of various social media platforms frequently used in daily life, the multimodal meme understanding (MMU) task has been garnering increasing attention. MMU aims to explore and comprehend the meanings of memes from various perspectives by performing tasks such as metaphor recognition, sentiment analysis, intention detection, and offensiveness detection. Despite making progress, limitations persist due to the loss of fine-grained metaphorical visual clue and the neglect of multimodal text-image weak correlation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-granular multimodal clue fusion model (MGMCF) to advance MMU. Firstly, we design an object-level semantic mining module to extract object-level image feature clues, achieving fine-grained feature clue extraction and enhancing the model's ability to capture metaphorical details and semantics. Secondly, we propose a brand-new global-local cross-modal interaction model to address the weak correlation between text and images. This model facilitates effective interaction between global multimodal contextual clues and local unimodal feature clues, strengthening their representations through a bidirectional cross-modal attention mechanism. Finally, we devise a dual-semantic guided training strategy to enhance the model's understanding and alignment of multimodal representations in the semantic space. Experiments conducted on the widely-used MET-MEME bilingual dataset demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, there is an 8.14% increase in precision for offensiveness detection task, and respective accuracy enhancements of 3.53%, 3.89%, and 3.52% for metaphor recognition, sentiment analysis, and intention detection tasks. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing MMU.

This research presents an advanced sentiment analysis framework studied on Iranian restaurant reviews, combining fuzzy logic with conventional sentiment analysis techniques to assess both sentiment polarity and intensity. A dataset of 1266 reviews, alongside corresponding star ratings, was compiled and preprocessed for analysis. Initial sentiment analysis was conducted using the Sentiment Intensity Analyzer (VADER), a rule-based tool that assigns sentiment scores across positive, negative, and neutral categories. However, a noticeable bias toward neutrality often led to an inaccurate representation of sentiment intensity. To mitigate this issue, based on a fuzzy perspective, two refinement techniques were introduced, applying square-root and fourth-root transformations to amplify positive and negative sentiment scores while maintaining neutrality. This led to three distinct methodologies: Approach 1, utilizing unaltered VADER scores; Approach 2, modifying sentiment values using the square root; and Approach 3, applying the fourth root for further refinement. A Fuzzy Inference System incorporating comprehensive fuzzy rules was then developed to process these refined scores and generate a single, continuous sentiment value for each review based on each approach. Comparative analysis, including human supervision and alignment with customer star ratings, revealed that the refined approaches significantly improved sentiment analysis by reducing neutrality bias and better capturing sentiment intensity. Despite these advancements, minor over-amplification and persistent neutrality in domain-specific cases were identified, leading us to propose several future studies to tackle these occasional barriers. The study's methodology and outcomes offer valuable insights for businesses seeking a more precise understanding of consumer sentiment, enhancing sentiment analysis across various industries.

Social media platforms are becoming the foundations of social interactions including messaging and opinion expression. In this regard, Sentiment Analysis techniques focus on providing solutions to ensure the retrieval and analysis of generated data including sentiments, emotions, and discussed topics. International competitions such as the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) have attracted many researchers and practitioners with a special research interest in building sentiment analysis systems. In our work, we study top-ranking systems for each SemEval edition during the 2013-2021 period, a total of 658 teams participated in these editions with increasing interest over years. We analyze the proposed systems marking the evolution of research trends with a focus on the main components of sentiment analysis systems including data acquisition, preprocessing, and classification. Our study shows an active use of preprocessing techniques, an evolution of features engineering and word representation from lexicon-based approaches to word embeddings, and the dominance of neural networks and transformers over the classification phase fostering the use of ready-to-use models. Moreover, we provide researchers with insights based on experimented systems which will allow rapid prototyping of new systems and help practitioners build for future SemEval editions.

Multimodal sentiment analysis enhances conventional sentiment analysis, which traditionally relies solely on text, by incorporating information from different modalities such as images, text, and audio. This paper proposes a novel multimodal sentiment analysis architecture that integrates text and image data to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sentiments. For text feature extraction, we utilize BERT, a natural language processing model. For image feature extraction, we employ DINOv2, a vision-transformer-based model. The textual and visual latent features are integrated using proposed fusion techniques, namely the Basic Fusion Model, Self-Attention Fusion Model, and Dual-Attention Fusion Model. Experiments on three datasets--the Memotion 7k dataset, MVSA-single dataset, and MVSA-multi dataset--demonstrate the viability and practicality of the proposed multimodal architecture.