Lexicon-based sentiment analysis (SA) in finance leverages specialized, manually annotated lexicons created by human experts to extract sentiment from financial texts. Although lexicon-based methods are simple to implement and fast to operate on textual data, they require considerable manual annotation efforts to create, maintain, and update the lexicons. These methods are also considered inferior to the deep learning-based approaches, such as transformer models, which have become dominant in various NLP tasks due to their remarkable performance. However, transformers require extensive data and computational resources for both training and testing. Additionally, they involve significant prediction times, making them unsuitable for real-time production environments or systems with limited processing capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology named eXplainable Lexicons (XLex) that combines the advantages of both lexicon-based methods and transformer models. We propose an approach that utilizes transformers and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for explainability to learn financial lexicons. Our study presents four main contributions. Firstly, we demonstrate that transformer-aided explainable lexicons can enhance the vocabulary coverage of the benchmark Loughran-McDonald (LM) lexicon, reducing the human involvement in annotating, maintaining, and updating the lexicons. Secondly, we show that the resulting lexicon outperforms the standard LM lexicon in SA of financial datasets. Thirdly, we illustrate that the lexicon-based approach is significantly more efficient in terms of model speed and size compared to transformers. Lastly, the XLex approach is inherently more interpretable than transformer models as lexicon models rely on predefined rules, allowing for better insights into the results of SA and making the XLex approach a viable tool for financial decision-making.

Welcome to our November 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we deconstruct sentiment analysis, find out about few-shot learning in medical imaging, investigate rare events, and look forward to our science communication training session at NeurIPS. In their paper The Sentiment Problem: A Critical Survey towards Deconstructing Sentiment Analysis, Pranav Venkit, Mukund Srinath, Sanjana Gautam, Saranya Venkatraman, Vipul Gupta, Rebecca Passonneau and Shomir Wilson present a review of the sociotechnical aspects of sentiment analysis. In this interview, Pranav and Mukund tell us more about sentiment analysis, how they went about surveying the literature, and recommendations for researchers in the field. Deep learning models employed in medical imaging are limited by the lack of annotated images.

Instagram, a social media platform, has in the vicinity of 2 billion active users in 2023. The platform allows users to post photos and videos with one another. However, cyberbullying remains a significant problem for about 50% of young Indonesians. To address this issue, sentiment analysis for comment filtering uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Easy Data Augmentation (EDA). EDA will augment the dataset, enabling robust prediction and analysis of cyberbullying by introducing more variation. Based on the tests, SVM combination with EDA results in a 2.52% increase in the k-Fold Cross Validation score. Our proposed approach shows an improved accuracy of 92.5%, 2.5% higher than that of the existing state-of-the-art method. To maintain the reproducibility and replicability of this research, the source code can be accessed at uns.id/eda_svm.

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an indispensable task for many real-world applications. Compared to limited resourced languages (i.e., Arabic, Bengali), most of the research on SA are conducted for high resourced languages (i.e., English, Chinese). Moreover, the reasons behind any prediction of the Arabic sentiment analysis methods exploiting advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches are like black-box - quite difficult to understand. This paper proposes an explainable sentiment classification framework for the Arabic language by introducing a noise layer on Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-BiLSTM models that overcome over-fitting problem. The proposed framework can explain specific predictions by training a local surrogate explainable model to understand why a particular sentiment (positive or negative) is being predicted. We carried out experiments on public benchmark Arabic SA datasets. The results concluded that adding noise layers improves the performance in sentiment analysis for the Arabic language by reducing overfitting and our method outperformed some known state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the introduced explainability with noise layer could make the model more transparent and accountable and hence help adopting AI-enabled system in practice.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), a nuanced task in text analysis, seeks to discern sentiment orientation linked to specific aspect terms in text. Traditional approaches often overlook or inadequately model the explicit syntactic structures of sentences, crucial for effective aspect term identification and sentiment determination. Addressing this gap, we introduce an innovative model: Syntactic Dependency Enhanced Multi-Task Interaction Architecture (SDEMTIA) for comprehensive ABSA. Our approach innovatively exploits syntactic knowledge (dependency relations and types) using a specialized Syntactic Dependency Embedded Interactive Network (SDEIN). We also incorporate a novel and efficient message-passing mechanism within a multi-task learning framework to bolster learning efficacy. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets showcase our model's superiority, significantly surpassing existing methods. Additionally, incorporating BERT as an auxiliary feature extractor further enhances our model's performance.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have significantly bolstered the technological world. This paper explores the potential of transfer learning in natural language processing focusing mainly on sentiment analysis. The models trained on the big data can also be used where data are scarce. The claim is that, compared to training models from scratch, transfer learning, using pre-trained BERT models, can increase sentiment classification accuracy. The study adopts a sophisticated experimental design that uses the IMDb dataset of sentimentally labelled movie reviews. Pre-processing includes tokenization and encoding of text data, making it suitable for NLP models. The dataset is used on a BERT based model, measuring its performance using accuracy. The result comes out to be 100 per cent accurate. Although the complete accuracy could appear impressive, it might be the result of overfitting or a lack of generalization. Further analysis is required to ensure the model's ability to handle diverse and unseen data. The findings underscore the effectiveness of transfer learning in NLP, showcasing its potential to excel in sentiment analysis tasks. However, the research calls for a cautious interpretation of perfect accuracy and emphasizes the need for additional measures to validate the model's generalization.

Product reviews often contain a large number of implicit aspects and object-attribute co-existence cases. Unfortunately, many existing studies in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) have overlooked this issue, which can make it difficult to extract opinions comprehensively and fairly. In this paper, we propose a new task called Entity-Aspect-Opinion-Sentiment Quadruple Extraction (EASQE), which aims to hierarchically decompose aspect terms into entities and aspects to avoid information loss, non-exclusive annotations, and opinion misunderstandings in ABSA tasks. To facilitate research in this new task, we have constructed four datasets (Res14-EASQE, Res15-EASQE, Res16-EASQE, and Lap14-EASQE) based on the SemEval Restaurant and Laptop datasets. We have also proposed a novel two-stage sequence-tagging based Trigger-Opinion framework as the baseline for the EASQE task. Empirical evaluations show that our Trigger-Opinion framework can generate satisfactory EASQE results and can also be applied to other ABSA tasks, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We have made the four datasets and source code of Trigger-Opinion publicly available to facilitate further research in this area.

Even though online social movements can quickly become viral on social media, languages can be a barrier to timely monitoring and analyzing the underlying online social behaviors (OSB). This is especially true for under-resourced languages on social media like dialectal Arabic; the primary language used by Arabs on social media. Therefore, it is crucial to provide solutions to efficiently exploit resources from high-resourced languages to solve language-dependent OSB analysis in under-resourced languages. This paper proposes to localize content of resources in high-resourced languages into under-resourced Arabic dialects. Content localization goes beyond content translation that converts text from one language to another; content localization adapts culture, language nuances and regional preferences from one language to a specific language/dialect. Automating understanding of the natural and familiar day-to-day expressions in different regions, is the key to achieve a wider analysis of OSB especially for smart cities. In this paper, we utilize content-localization based neural machine translation to develop sentiment and hate classifiers for two low-resourced Arabic dialects: Levantine and Gulf. Not only this but we also leverage unsupervised learning to facilitate the analysis of sentiment and hate predictions by inferring hidden topics from the corresponding data and providing coherent interpretations of those topics in their native language/dialects. The experimental evaluations and proof-of-concept COVID-19 case study on real data have validated the effectiveness of our proposed system in precisely distinguishing sentiments and accurately identifying hate content in both Levantine and Gulf Arabic dialects. Our findings shed light on the importance of considering the unique nature of dialects within the same language and ignoring the dialectal aspect would lead to misleading analysis.

Carbon accounting is a fundamental building block in our global path to emissions reduction and decarbonization, yet many challenges exist in achieving reliable and trusted carbon accounting measures. We motivate that carbon accounting not only needs to be more data-driven, but also more methodologically sound. We discuss the need for alternative, more diverse data sources that can play a significant role on our path to trusted carbon accounting procedures and elaborate on not only why, but how Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in particular can unlock reasonable access to a treasure trove of alternative data sets in light of the recent advances in the field that better enable the utilization of unstructured data in this process. We present a case study of the recent developments on real-world data via an NLP-powered analysis using OpenAI's GPT API on financial and shipping data. We conclude the paper with a discussion on how these methods and approaches can be integrated into a broader framework for AI-enabled integrative carbon accounting.

In March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic as it spread to nearly every country. By mid-2021, India had introduced three vaccines: Covishield, Covaxin, and Sputnik. To ensure successful vaccination in a densely populated country like India, understanding public sentiment was crucial. Social media, particularly Reddit with over 430 million users, played a vital role in disseminating information. This study employs data mining techniques to analyze Reddit data and gauge Indian sentiments towards COVID-19 vaccines. Using Python's Text Blob library, comments are annotated to assess general sentiments. Results show that most Reddit users in India expressed neutrality about vaccination, posing a challenge for the Indian government's efforts to vaccinate a significant portion of the population.