In the realm of social media discourse, the integration of slang enriches communication, reflecting the sociocultural identities of users. This study investigates the capability of large language models (LLMs) to paraphrase slang within climate-related tweets from Nigeria and the UK, with a focus on identifying emotional nuances. Using DistilRoBERTa as the base-line model, we observe its limited comprehension of slang. To improve cross-cultural understanding, we gauge the effectiveness of leading LLMs ChatGPT 4, Gemini, and LLaMA3 in slang paraphrasing. While ChatGPT 4 and Gemini demonstrate comparable effectiveness in slang paraphrasing, LLaMA3 shows less coverage, with all LLMs exhibiting limitations in coverage, especially of Nigerian slang. Our findings underscore the necessity for culturally sensitive LLM development in emotion classification, particularly in non-anglocentric regions.

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) correspondences form foundational frameworks of tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis or automatic speech recognition. The G2P process involves taking words in their written form and generating their pronunciation. In this paper, we critique the status quo definition of a grapheme, currently a forced alignment process relating a single character to either a phoneme or a blank unit, that underlies the majority of modern approaches. We develop a linguistically-motivated redefinition from simple concepts such as vowel and consonant count and word length and offer a proof-of-concept implementation based on a multi-binary neural classification task. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results with a 31.86% Word Error Rate on a standard benchmark, while generating linguistically meaningful grapheme segmentations.

This paper outlines our multimodal ensemble learning system for identifying persuasion techniques in memes. We contribute an approach which utilises the novel inclusion of consistent named visual entities extracted using Google Vision’s API as an external knowledge source, joined to our multimodal ensemble via late fusion. As well as detailing our experiments in ensemble combinations, fusion methods and data augmentation, we explore the impact of including external data and summarise post-evaluation improvements to our architecture based on analysis of the task results.

To understand the global trends of human opinion on climate change in specific geographical areas, this research proposes a framework to analyse linguistic features and cultural differences in climate-related tweets. Our study combines transformer networks with linguistic feature analysis to address small dataset limitations and gain insights into cultural differences in tweets from the UK and Nigeria. Our study found that Nigerians use more leadership language and informal words in discussing climate change on Twitter compared to the UK, as these topics are treated as an issue of salience and urgency. In contrast, the UK’s discourse about climate change on Twitter is characterised by using more formal, logical, and longer words per sentence compared to Nigeria. Also, we confirm the geographical identifiability of tweets through a classification task using DistilBERT, which achieves 83% of accuracy.

Several existing resources are available for sentiment analysis (SA) tasks that are used for learning sentiment specific embedding (SSE) representations. These resources are either large, common-sense knowledge graphs (KG) that cover a limited amount of polarities/emotions or they are smaller in size (e.g.: lexicons), which require costly human annotation and cover fine-grained emotions. Therefore using knowledge resources to learn SSE representations is either limited by the low coverage of polarities/emotions or the overall size of a resource. In this paper, we first introduce a new directed KG called ‘RELATE’, which is built to overcome both the issue of low coverage of emotions and the issue of scalability. RELATE is the first KG of its size to cover Ekman’s six basic emotions that are directed towards entities. It is based on linguistic rules to incorporate the benefit of semantics without relying on costly human annotation. The performance of ‘RELATE’ is evaluated by learning SSE representations using a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN).

In this paper we present a dilated LSTM with attention mechanism for document-level classification of suicide notes, last statements and depressed notes. We achieve an accuracy of 87.34% compared to competitive baselines of 80.35% (Logistic Model Tree) and 82.27% (Bi-directional LSTM with Attention). Furthermore, we provide an analysis of both the grammatical and thematic content of suicide notes, last statements and depressed notes. We find that the use of personal pronouns, cognitive processes and references to loved ones are most important. Finally, we show through visualisations of attention weights that the Dilated LSTM with attention is able to identify the same distinguishing features across documents as the linguistic analysis.