arXiv AI

Beyond a Single Sentiment Score: Topical and Affective Dimensions of Emoji Meaning on Twitter

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Two Emojis of Difference: What Multilingual Affective Generation Benchmarks Actually Measure

The paper audits a multilingual affective generation benchmark that uses emoji summaries for Bangla, English, and Hindi sentences. It finds that the benchmark’s conclusions are largely artifacts of the measurement instrument, with no system significantly outperforming another when annotators are treated as random factors. The study shows that annotator identity and output length drive most variance, and proposes a new stable metric called emoji‑affect decodability.

By Fardeen Sadab, Adib Sakhawat
arXiv AI
Sep 3

EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision

The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses by leveraging weak supervision from emoji distributions. It builds the EmojiDialogue dataset, extending EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings to generate responses that align with the listener’s stance. In blind pairwise evaluations, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, notably improving contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness compared to baselines.

By Ziyuan Jin, Yuxuan Ge, Zheng Tian
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

Nobody Truly Agrees on Sentiment: Humans, Bespoke Tools, and LLMs Struggle with Social Media Texts

The study evaluates how well three sentiment‑analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, Twitter‑roBERTa‑base) and three large language models (Qwen3‑32B, GPT‑OSS‑120B, Llama‑4‑Maverick‑17B) agree with six human raters on 100 tweets. Agreement was measured with Cohen’s and Fleiss’ kappa, revealing only fair inter‑human agreement and higher concordance for binary sentiment labels than for three‑class labels. Twitter‑roBERTa‑base achieved the strongest alignment with humans, especially for negative versus non‑negative sentiment, while the LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, particularly for positive versus non‑positive classifications. The findings emphasize that domain‑specific fine‑tuning and human‑centered evaluation are essential for reliable social media sentiment analysis.

By Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Sivakanesan Dhanushkanda, Shuai Hao, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

EmoStance: Response-Side Affective-Orientation Control for Empathetic Response Generation via Emoji Weak Supervision

The paper introduces EmoStance, a method for controlling the affective orientation of empathetic responses in dialogue systems. It leverages weak supervision from multi‑annotator emoji distributions to create a latent control space that approximates listener stance, and uses a frozen instruction‑tuned LLM steered by continuous prefix embeddings. Evaluation shows a 62.2% decisive win rate over baselines, especially in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Jokes Aside: Measuring the Semantic Distance of Double Meanings

The paper investigates how semantic distance and ambiguity contribute to joke humor by revisiting and extending metrics from prior work. It introduces a new symmetry metric—measuring how close the ambiguous element Z is to both X and Y—and evaluates it using two embedding models on three joke datasets, including expanded versions with paired ambiguous sentences. Although models based on these metrics performed poorly in predicting humor ratings, the symmetry metric consistently correlated with higher-rated jokes, hinting it captures a key, though not sole, property of humor.

By Fabio De Ponte