Fine grain emotion analysis in Spanish using linguistic features and transformers.

Mental health issues are a global concern, with a particular focus on the rise of depression. Depression affects millions of people worldwide and is a leading cause of suicide, particularly among young people. Recent surveys indicate an increase in cases of depression during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected approximately 5.4% of the population in Spain in 2020. Social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) have become important hubs for health information as more people turn to these platforms to share their struggles and seek emotional support. Researchers have discovered a link between emotions and mental illnesses such as depression. This correlation provides a valuable opportunity for automated analysis of social media data to detect changes in mental health status that might otherwise go unnoticed, thus preventing more serious health consequences. Therefore, this research explores the field of emotion analysis in Spanish towards mental disorders. There are two contributions in this area. On the one hand, the compilation, translation, evaluation and correction of a novel dataset composed of a mixture of other existing datasets in the bibliography. This dataset compares a total of 16 emotions, with an emphasis on negative emotions. On the other hand, the in-depth evaluation of this novel dataset with several state-of-the-art transformers based on encoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures. The analysis compromises monolingual, multilingual and distilled models as well as feature integration techniques. The best results are obtained with the encoder-only MarIA model, with a macro-average F1 score of 60.4771%.

Evaluation of transformer models for financial targeted sentiment analysis in Spanish.

Nowadays, financial data from social media plays an important role to predict the stock market. However, the exponential growth of financial information and the different polarities of sentiment that other sectors or stakeholders may have on the same information has led to the need for new technologies that automatically collect and classify large volumes of information quickly and easily for each stakeholder. In this scenario, we conduct a targeted sentiment analysis that can automatically extract the main economic target from financial texts and obtain the polarity of a text towards such main economic target, other companies and society in general. To this end, we have compiled a novel corpus of financial tweets and news headlines in Spanish, constituting a valuable resource for the Spanish-focused research community. In addition, we have carried out a performance comparison of different Spanish-specific large language models, with MarIA and BETO achieving the best results. Our best result has an overall performance of 76.04%, 74.16%, and 68.07% in macro F1-score for the sentiment classification towards the main economic target, society, and other companies, respectively, and an accuracy of 69.74% for target detection. We have also evaluated the performance of multi-label classification models in this context and obtained a performance of 71.13%.