# SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17924 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17924/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Sentiment Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15005/) (2023)
- [Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08914/) (2016)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good Sentiment Analyzer? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04339/) (2023)
- [Robustness to Spurious Correlations in Text Classification via Automatically Generated Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10040/) (2020)
- [Identifying Spurious Correlations for Robust Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02458/) (2020)
- [SentiBERT: A Transferable Transformer-Based Architecture for Compositional Sentiment Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04114/) (2020)
- [MASKER: Masked Keyword Regularization for Reliable Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09392/) (2020)
- [Sentiment-Aware Word and Sentence Level Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09803/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [EmoBench-M: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04424/) (2025)
- [Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04638/) (2024)
- [EmotionHallucer: Evaluating Emotion Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11405/) (2025)
- ["Yeah Right!" -- Do LLMs Exhibit Multimodal Feature Transfer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04138/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.