Human communication has a multi-modal and multi-affect nature.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of public sentiment toward traffic management policies in Knoxville, Tennessee, utilizing social media data from Twitter and Reddit platforms. We collected and analyzed 7906 posts spanning January 2022 to December 2023, employing Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner (VADER) for sentiment analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling. Our findings reveal predominantly negative sentiment, with significant variations across platforms and topics. Twitter exhibited more negative sentiment compared to Reddit. Topic modeling identified six distinct themes, with construction-related topics showing the most negative sentiment while general traffic discussions were more positive. Spatiotemporal analysis revealed geographic and temporal patterns in sentiment expression. The research demonstrates social media's potential as a real-time public sentiment monitoring tool for transportation planning and policy evaluation.

This research examines the potential of datasets generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, aiming to overcome challenges related to data acquisition and privacy concerns associated with real-world data. Focusing on negative valence text, a critical component of sentiment analysis, we explore the use of LLM-generated synthetic news headlines as an alternative to real-world data. A specialized corpus of negative news headlines was created using tailored prompts to capture diverse negative sentiments across various societal domains. The synthetic headlines were validated by expert review and further analyzed in embedding space to assess their alignment with real-world negative news in terms of content, tone, length, and style. Key metrics such as correlation with real headlines, perplexity, coherence, and realism were evaluated. The synthetic dataset was benchmarked against two sets of real news headlines using evaluations including the Comparative Perplexity Test, Comparative Readability Test, Comparative POS Profiling, BERTScore, and Comparative Semantic Similarity. Results show the generated headlines match real headlines with the only marked divergence being in the proper noun score of the POS profile test.

Understanding sentiment in financial documents is crucial for gaining insights into market behavior. These reports often contain obfuscated language designed to present a positive or neutral outlook, even when underlying conditions may be less favorable. This paper presents a novel approach using Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to decode obfuscated sentiment in Thai financial annual reports. We develop specific guidelines for annotating obfuscated sentiment in these texts and annotate more than one hundred financial reports. We then benchmark various text classification models on this annotated dataset, demonstrating strong performance in sentiment classification. Additionally, we conduct an event study to evaluate the real-world implications of our sentiment analysis on stock prices. Our results suggest that market reactions are selectively influenced by specific aspects within the reports. Our findings underscore the complexity of sentiment analysis in financial texts and highlight the importance of addressing obfuscated language to accurately assess market sentiment.

This research proposes a systematic, large language model (LLM) approach for extracting product and service attributes, features, and associated sentiments from customer reviews. Grounded in marketing theory, the framework distinguishes perceptual attributes from actionable features, producing interpretable and managerially actionable insights. We apply the methodology to 20,000 Yelp reviews of Starbucks stores and evaluate eight prompt variants on a random subset of reviews. Model performance is assessed through agreement with human annotations and predictive validity for customer ratings. Results show high consistency between LLMs and human coders and strong predictive validity, confirming the reliability of the approach. Human coders required a median of six minutes per review, whereas the LLM processed each in two seconds, delivering comparable insights at a scale unattainable through manual coding. Managerially, the analysis identifies attributes and features that most strongly influence customer satisfaction and their associated sentiments, enabling firms to pinpoint "joy points," address "pain points," and design targeted interventions. We demonstrate how structured review data can power an actionable marketing dashboard that tracks sentiment over time and across stores, benchmarks performance, and highlights high-leverage features for improvement. Simulations indicate that enhancing sentiment for key service features could yield 1-2% average revenue gains per store.

Human communication has a multi-modal and multi-affect nature.

Mesh implants are widely utilized in hernia repair surgeries, but postoperative complications present a significant concern. This study analyzes patient reports from the Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience (MAUDE) database spanning 2000 to 2021 to investigate the emotional aspects of patients following mesh implantation using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Employing the National Research Council Canada (NRC) Emotion Lexicon and TextBlob for sentiment analysis, the research categorizes patient narratives into eight emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and assesses sentiment polarity. The goal is to discern patterns in patient sentiment over time and to identify reports signaling urgent concerns, referred to as "Concern Reports," thereby understanding shifts in patient experiences in relation to changes in medical device regulation and technological advancements in healthcare. The study detected an increase in Concern Reports and higher emotional intensity during the periods of 2011-2012 and 2017-2018. Through temporal analysis of Concern Reports and overall sentiment, this research provides valuable insights for healthcare practitioners, enhancing their understanding of patient experiences post-surgery, which is critical for improving preoperative counselling, postoperative care, and preparing patients for mesh implant surgeries. The study underscores the importance of emotional considerations in medical practices and the potential for sentiment analysis to inform and enhance patient care.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in language understanding. However, when LLMs align their outputs with deceptive and / or misleading prompts, the generated responses could deviate from the de facto information. Such observations are known as fawning hallucinations, where the model prioritizes alignment with the input's implied perspective over accuracy and truthfulness. In this work, we analyze fawning hallucinations in various natural language processing tasks and tailor the so-termed contrastive decoding method for fawning-hallucination mitigation. Specifically, we design two paradigms to generate corresponding deceptive and / or misleading inputs for the consistent fawning hallucinations induction. Then, we propose the collaborative contrastive decoding (CCD) to handle the fawning hallucinations across di ff erent tasks in LLMs. By contrasting the deviation in output distribution between induced and transformed neutral inputs, the proposed CCD can reduce reliance on deceptive and / or misleading information without requiring additional training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CCD can e ff ectively mitigate fawning hallucinations and improve the factuality of the generated responses over various tasks. Introduction Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by the Chat-GPT series [1], have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These tasks include text translation [2, 3], summarization [4, 5], and a ffective computing [6, 7, 8, 9], showcasing the versatility and impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the impressive performance, LLMs are criticized for the potential to generate fabricated, inaccurate, or incorrect information. This phenomenon, known as "hallucination", hinders the further practical application of LLMs.

System prompts in Large Language Models (LLMs) are predefined directives that guide model behaviour, taking precedence over user inputs in text processing and generation. LLM deployers increasingly use them to ensure consistent responses across contexts. While model providers set a foundation of system prompts, deployers and third-party developers can append additional prompts without visibility into others' additions, while this layered implementation remains entirely hidden from end-users. As system prompts become more complex, they can directly or indirectly introduce unaccounted for side effects. This lack of transparency raises fundamental questions about how the position of information in different directives shapes model outputs. As such, this work examines how the placement of information affects model behaviour. To this end, we compare how models process demographic information in system versus user prompts across six commercially available LLMs and 50 demographic groups. Our analysis reveals significant biases, manifesting in differences in user representation and decision-making scenarios. Since these variations stem from inaccessible and opaque system-level configurations, they risk representational, allocative and potential other biases and downstream harms beyond the user's ability to detect or correct. Our findings draw attention to these critical issues, which have the potential to perpetuate harms if left unexamined. Further, we argue that system prompt analysis must be incorporated into AI auditing processes, particularly as customisable system prompts become increasingly prevalent in commercial AI deployments.

Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages.