News media often shape the public mood not only by what they report but by how they frame it. The same event can appear calm in one outlet and alarming in another, reflecting subtle emotional bias in reporting. Negative or emotionally charged headlines tend to attract more attention and spread faster, which in turn encourages outlets to frame stories in ways that provoke stronger reactions. This research explores that tendency through large-scale emotion analysis of Bengali news. Using zero-shot inference with Gemma-3 4B, we analyzed 300000 Bengali news headlines and their content to identify the dominant emotion and overall tone of each. The findings reveal a clear dominance of negative emotions, particularly anger, fear, and disappointment, and significant variation in how similar stories are emotionally portrayed across outlets. Based on these insights, we propose design ideas for a human-centered news aggregator that visualizes emotional cues and helps readers recognize hidden affective framing in daily news.

In recent years, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has become a research hotspot that aims to utilize multimodal data for human sentiment understanding. Previous MSA studies have mainly focused on performing interaction and fusion on complete multimodal data, ignoring the problem of missing modalities in real-world applications due to occlusion, personal privacy constraints, and device malfunctions, resulting in low generalizability. To this end, we propose a Factorization-guided Semantic Recovery Framework (FSRF) to mitigate the modality missing problem in the MSA task. Specifically, we propose a de-redundant homo-heterogeneous factorization module that factorizes modality into modality-homogeneous, modality-heterogeneous, and noisy representations and design elaborate constraint paradigms for representation learning. Furthermore, we design a distribution-aligned self-distillation module that fully recovers the missing semantics by utilizing bidirectional knowledge transfer. Comprehensive experiments on two datasets indicate that FSRF has a significant performance advantage over previous methods with uncertain missing modalities.

Text analytics has traditionally required specialized knowledge in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or text analysis, which presents a barrier for entry-level analysts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have changed the landscape of NLP by enabling more accessible and automated text analysis (e.g., topic detection, summarization, information extraction, etc.). We introduce VIDEE, a system that supports entry-level data analysts to conduct advanced text analytics with intelligent agents. VIDEE instantiates a human-agent collaroration workflow consisting of three stages: (1) Decomposition, which incorporates a human-in-the-loop Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm to support generative reasoning with human feedback, (2) Execution, which generates an executable text analytics pipeline, and (3) Evaluation, which integrates LLM-based evaluation and visualizations to support user validation of execution results. We conduct two quantitative experiments to evaluate VIDEE's effectiveness and analyze common agent errors. A user study involving participants with varying levels of NLP and text analytics experience -- from none to expert -- demonstrates the system's usability and reveals distinct user behavior patterns. The findings identify design implications for human-agent collaboration, validate the practical utility of VIDEE for non-expert users, and inform future improvements to intelligent text analytics systems.

The current trend in information extraction (IE) is to rely extensively on large language models, effectively discarding decades of experience in building symbolic or statistical IE systems. This paper compares a neuro-symbolic (NS) and an LLM-based IE system in the agricultural domain, evaluating them on nine interviews across pork, dairy, and crop subdomains. The LLM-based system outperforms the NS one (F1 total: 69.4 vs. 52.7; core: 63.0 vs. 47.2), where total includes all extracted information and core focuses on essential details. However, each system has trade-offs: the NS approach offers faster runtime, greater control, and high accuracy in context-free tasks but lacks generalizability, struggles with contextual nuances, and requires significant resources to develop and maintain. The LLM-based system achieves higher performance, faster deployment, and easier maintenance but has slower runtime, limited control, model dependency and hallucination risks. Our findings highlight the "hidden cost" of deploying NLP systems in real-world applications, emphasizing the need to balance performance, efficiency, and control.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to identify and interpret human emotions by integrating information from heterogeneous data sources such as text, video, and audio. While deep learning models have advanced in network architecture design, they remain heavily limited by scarce multimodal annotated data. Although Mixup-based augmentation improves generalization in unimodal tasks, its direct application to MSA introduces critical challenges: random mixing often amplifies label ambiguity and semantic inconsistency due to the lack of emotion-aware mixing mechanisms. To overcome these issues, we propose MS-Mix, an adaptive, emotion-sensitive augmentation framework that automatically optimizes sample mixing in multimodal settings. The key components of MS-Mix include: (1) a Sentiment-Aware Sample Selection (SASS) strategy that effectively prevents semantic confusion caused by mixing samples with contradictory emotions. (2) a Sentiment Intensity Guided (SIG) module using multi-head self-attention to compute modality-specific mixing ratios dynamically based on their respective emotional intensities. (3) a Sentiment Alignment Loss (SAL) that aligns the prediction distributions across modalities, and incorporates the Kullback-Leibler-based loss as an additional regularization term to train the emotion intensity predictor and the backbone network jointly. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets with six state-of-the-art backbones confirm that MS-Mix consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a new standard for robust multimodal sentiment augmentation. The source code is available at: https://github.com/HongyuZhu-s/MS-Mix.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, offering fine-grained insights into opinions expressed in text. While existing research has largely focused on resource-rich languages like English which leveraging large annotated datasets, pre-trained models, and language-specific tools. These resources are often unavailable for low-resource languages such as Bengali. The ABSA task in Bengali remains poorly explored and is further complicated by its unique linguistic characteristics and a lack of annotated data, pre-trained models, and optimized hyperparameters. To address these challenges, this research propose CrosGrpsABS, a novel hybrid framework that leverages bidirectional cross-attention between syntactic and semantic graphs to enhance aspect-level sentiment classification. The CrosGrpsABS combines transformerbased contextual embeddings with graph convolutional networks, built upon rule-based syntactic dependency parsing and semantic similarity computations. By employing bidirectional crossattention, the model effectively fuses local syntactic structure with global semantic context, resulting in improved sentiment classification performance across both low- and high-resource settings. We evaluate CrosGrpsABS on four low-resource Bengali ABSA datasets and the high-resource English SemEval 2014 Task 4 dataset. The CrosGrpsABS consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving notable improvements, including a 0.93% F1-score increase for the Restaurant domain and a 1.06% gain for the Laptop domain in the SemEval 2014 Task 4 benchmark.

Entity-level sentiment classification involves identifying the sentiment polarity linked to specific entities within text. This task poses several challenges: effectively modeling the subtle and complex interactions between entities and their surrounding sentiment expressions; capturing dependencies that may span across sentences; and ensuring consistent sentiment predictions for multiple mentions of the same entity through coreference resolution. Additionally, linguistic phenomena such as negation, ambiguity, and overlapping opinions further complicate the analysis. These complexities make entity-level sentiment classification a difficult problem, especially in real-world, noisy textual data. To address these issues, we propose SpanEIT, a novel framework integrating dynamic span interaction and graph-aware memory mechanisms for enhanced entity-sentiment relational modeling. SpanEIT builds span-based representations for entities and candidate sentiment phrases, employs bidirectional attention for fine-grained interactions, and uses a graph attention network to capture syntactic and co-occurrence relations. A coreference-aware memory module ensures entity-level consistency across documents. Experiments on FSAD, BARU, and IMDB datasets show SpanEIT outperforms state-of-the-art transformer and hybrid baselines in accuracy and F1 scores. Ablation and interpretability analyses validate the effectiveness of our approach, underscoring its potential for fine-grained sentiment analysis in applications like social media monitoring and customer feedback analysis.

Recognizing that the language modality typically contains dense sentiment information, we consider it as the dominant modality and present an innovative Language-dominated Noise-resistant Learning Network (LNLN) to achieve robust MSA.

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for a comprehensive understanding of public sentiment and reactions. Despite the availability of numerous public datasets on COVID-19, some reaching volumes of up to 100 billion data points, challenges persist regarding the availability of labeled data and the presence of coarse-grained or inappropriate sentiment labels. In this paper, we introduce SenWave, a novel fine-grained multi-language sentiment analysis dataset specifically designed for analyzing COVID-19 tweets, featuring ten sentiment categories across five languages. The dataset comprises 10,000 annotated tweets each in English and Arabic, along with 30,000 translated tweets in Spanish, French, and Italian, derived from English tweets. Additionally, it includes over 105 million unlabeled tweets collected during various COVID-19 waves. To enable accurate fine-grained sentiment classification, we fine-tuned pre-trained transformer-based language models using the labeled tweets. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of the evolving emotional landscape across languages, countries, and topics, revealing significant insights over time. Furthermore, we assess the compatibility of our dataset with ChatGPT, demonstrating its robustness and versatility in various applications. Our dataset and accompanying code are publicly accessible on the repository\footnote{https://github.com/gitdevqiang/SenWave}. We anticipate that this work will foster further exploration into fine-grained sentiment analysis for complex events within the NLP community, promoting more nuanced understanding and research innovations.