Sentiment or mood can express themselves on various levels in music. In automatic analysis, the actual audio data is usually analyzed, but the lyrics can also play a crucial role in the perception of moods. We first evaluate various models for sentiment analysis based on lyrics and audio separately. The corresponding approaches already show satisfactory results, but they also exhibit weaknesses, the causes of which we examine in more detail. Furthermore, different approaches to combining the audio and lyrics results are proposed and evaluated. Considering both modalities generally leads to improved performance. We investigate misclassifications and (also intentional) contradictions between audio and lyrics sentiment more closely, and identify possible causes. Finally, we address fundamental problems in this research area, such as high subjectivity, lack of data, and inconsistency in emotion taxonomies.

Sentiment analysis is one of the most widely used techniques in text analysis. Recent advancements with Large Language Models have made it more accurate and accessible than ever, allowing researchers to classify text with only a plain English prompt. However, "sentiment" entails a wide variety of concepts depending on the domain and tools used. It has been used to mean emotion, opinions, market movements, or simply a general ``good-bad'' dimension. This raises a question: What exactly are language models doing when prompted to label documents by sentiment? This paper first overviews how sentiment is defined across different contexts, highlighting that it is a confounded measurement construct in that it entails multiple variables, such as emotional valence and opinion, without disentangling them. I then test three language models across two data sets with prompts requesting sentiment, valence, and stance classification. I find that sentiment labels most strongly correlate with valence labels. I further find that classification improves when researchers more precisely specify their dimension of interest rather than using the less well-defined concept of sentiment. I conclude by encouraging researchers to move beyond "sentiment" when feasible and use a more precise measurement construct.

Although pre-trained language models have exhibited great flexibility and versatility with prompt-based few-shot learning, they suffer from the extensive parameter size and limited applicability for inference. Recent studies have suggested that PLMs be used as dataset generators and a tiny task-specific model be trained to achieve efficient inference. However, their applicability to various domains is limited because they tend to generate domain-specific datasets. In this work, we propose a novel approach to universal domain generalization that generates a dataset regardless of the target domain. This allows for generalization of the tiny task model to any domain that shares the label space, thus enhancing the real-world applicability of the dataset generation paradigm. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method accomplishes generalizability across various domains while using a parameter set that is orders of magnitude smaller than PLMs.

The pre-training for language models captures general language understanding but fails to distinguish the affective impact of a particular context to a specific word. Recent works have sought to introduce contrastive learning (CL) for sentiment-aware pre-training in acquiring affective information. Nevertheless, these methods present two significant limitations. First, the compatibility of the GPU memory often limits the number of negative samples, hindering the opportunities to learn good representations. In addition, using only a few sentiment polarities as hard labels, e.g., positive, neutral, and negative, to supervise CL will force all representations to converge to a few points, leading to the issue of latent space collapse. This study proposes a soft momentum contrastive learning (SoftMCL) for fine-grained sentiment-aware pre-training. Instead of hard labels, we introduce valence ratings as soft-label supervision for CL to fine-grained measure the sentiment similarities between samples. The proposed SoftMCL is conducted on both the word- and sentence-level to enhance the model's ability to learn affective information. A momentum queue was introduced to expand the contrastive samples, allowing storing and involving more negatives to overcome the limitations of hardware platforms. Extensive experiments were conducted on four different sentiment-related tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed SoftMCL method. The code and data of the proposed SoftMCL is available at: https://www.github.com/wangjin0818/SoftMCL/.

The emergence of multimodal data on social media platforms presents new opportunities to better understand user sentiments toward a given aspect. However, existing multimodal datasets for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) often focus on textual annotations, neglecting fine-grained information in images. Consequently, these datasets fail to fully exploit the richness inherent in multimodal. To address this, we introduce a new Vietnamese multimodal dataset, named ViMACSA, which consists of 4,876 text-image pairs with 14,618 fine-grained annotations for both text and image in the hotel domain. Additionally, we propose a Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Fusion Framework (FCMF) that effectively learns both intra- and inter-modality interactions and then fuses these information to produce a unified multimodal representation. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms SOTA models on the ViMACSA dataset, achieving the highest F1 score of 79.73%. We also explore characteristics and challenges in Vietnamese multimodal sentiment analysis, including misspellings, abbreviations, and the complexities of the Vietnamese language. This work contributes both a benchmark dataset and a new framework that leverages fine-grained multimodal information to improve multimodal aspect-category sentiment analysis. Our dataset is available for research purposes: https://github.com/hoangquy18/Multimodal-Aspect-Category-Sentiment-Analysis.

Extracting information from customer feedback is a key capability required for identifying current drawbacks and scope for further improvement. Online shoppers routinely provide feedback on their experience with the purchased product that are not just important for the other potential customers but also a critical feedback to the product manufacturers for the next cycle of iteration. Similar feedbacks are available in various other domains ranging from Manufacturing to Healthcare where granular opinions (sentiments) about various dimensions (aspects) of the used product (or service) are available in textual form but need to be understood. Due to the presence of multiple aspects (and the corresponding sentiments) extraction of these aspect-sentiment pairs is a challenging task and since its introduction in 2014 (SemEval-2014 Task-4, Pontiki et al.) Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) attracted various different approaches and is still under active consideration. ABSA demands semantic understanding of the sentence where it is necessary to identify the aspect terms (defining "what") and the opinion terms (defining "why") and the connection between each related pairs (resulting in a positive, neutral or negative sentiment, i.e., "how").

Financial sentiment analysis allows financial institutions like Banks and Insurance Companies to better manage the credit scoring of their customers in a better way. Financial domain uses specialized mechanisms which makes sentiment analysis difficult. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained language model which can help to solve this problem with fewer labelled data. We extend on the principles of Transfer learning and Transformation architecture principles and also take into consideration recent outbreak of pandemics like COVID. We apply the sentiment analysis to two different sets of data. We also take smaller training set and fine tune the same as part of the model.

Nigerian Pidgin is an English-derived contact language and is traditionally an oral language, spoken by approximately 100 million people. No orthographic standard has yet been adopted, and thus the few available Pidgin datasets that exist are characterised by noise in the form of orthographic variations. This contributes to under-performance of models in critical NLP tasks. The current work is the first to describe various types of orthographic variations commonly found in Nigerian Pidgin texts, and model this orthographic variation. The variations identified in the dataset form the basis of a phonetic-theoretic framework for word editing, which is used to generate orthographic variations to augment training data. We test the effect of this data augmentation on two critical NLP tasks: machine translation and sentiment analysis. The proposed variation generation framework augments the training data with new orthographic variants which are relevant for the test set but did not occur in the training set originally. Our results demonstrate the positive effect of augmenting the training data with a combination of real texts from other corpora as well as synthesized orthographic variation, resulting in performance improvements of 2.1 points in sentiment analysis and 1.4 BLEU points in translation to English.

Existing datasets for attribute value extraction (AVE) predominantly focus on explicit attribute values while neglecting the implicit ones, lack product images, are often not publicly available, and lack an in-depth human inspection across diverse domains. To address these limitations, we present ImplicitAVE, the first, publicly available multimodal dataset for implicit attribute value extraction. ImplicitAVE, sourced from the MAVE dataset, is carefully curated and expanded to include implicit AVE and multimodality, resulting in a refined dataset of 68k training and 1.6k testing data across five domains. We also explore the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to implicit AVE, establishing a comprehensive benchmark for MLLMs on the ImplicitAVE dataset. Six recent MLLMs with eleven variants are evaluated across diverse settings, revealing that implicit value extraction remains a challenging task for MLLMs. The contributions of this work include the development and release of ImplicitAVE, and the exploration and benchmarking of various MLLMs for implicit AVE, providing valuable insights and potential future research directions. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/ImplicitAVE

Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks involve the extraction of fine-grained sentiment tuples from sentences, aiming to discern the author's opinions. Conventional methodologies predominantly rely on supervised approaches; however, the efficacy of such methods diminishes in low-resource domains lacking labeled datasets since they often lack the ability to generalize across domains. To address this challenge, we propose a simple and novel unsupervised approach to extract opinion terms and the corresponding sentiment polarity for aspect terms in a sentence. Our experimental evaluations, conducted on four benchmark datasets, demonstrate compelling performance to extract the aspect oriented opinion words as well as assigning sentiment polarity. Additionally, unsupervised approaches for opinion word mining have not been explored and our work establishes a benchmark for the same.