Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), the role of syntactic information remains underexplored in LLMs. Syntactic structures are known to be crucial for capturing aspect-opinion relationships. To explore whether LLMs can effectively leverage syntactic information to improve ABSA performance, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework, the Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (Syn-Chain). Syn-Chain sequentially analyzes syntactic dependencies, extracts opinions, and classifies sentiment. We introduce Syn-Chain into LLMs via zero-shot prompting, and results show that Syn-Chain significantly enhances ABSA performance, though smaller LLM exhibit weaker performance. Furthermore, we enhance smaller LLMs via distillation using GPT-3.5-generated Syn-Chain responses, achieving state-of-the-art ABSA performance. Our findings highlight the importance of syntactic information for improving LLMs in ABSA and offer valuable insights for future research.

In this study, we introduce an MLP approach for extracting multimodal cause utterances in conversations, utilizing the multimodal conversational emotion causes from the ECF dataset. Our research focuses on evaluating a bi-modal framework that integrates video and audio embeddings to analyze emotional expressions within dialogues. The core of our methodology involves the extraction of embeddings from pre-trained models for each modality, followed by their concatenation and subsequent classification via an MLP network. We compared the accuracy performances across different modality combinations including text-audio-video, video-audio, and audio only.