# Emotion-Enhanced Multi-Task Learning with LLMs for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19122/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [EmoBank: Studying the Impact of Annotation Perspective and Representation Format on Dimensional Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01996/) (2022)
- [Multi-task Learning for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05812/) (2019)
- [Text Data Augmentation for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18845/) (2025)
- [Solving Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis as a Text Generation Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07310/) (2021)
- [Joint Aspect and Polarity Classification for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with End-to-End Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09238/) (2018)
- [Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning Networks for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02656/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Learning with Sentiment, Emotion, and Target Detection to Recognize Hate Speech and Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10255/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Coherence-Aware Network with Hierarchical Disentanglement for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10214/) (2024)
- [EmoGRACE: Aspect-based emotion analysis for social media data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15133/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) has achieved remarkable progress with large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches primarily emphasize sentiment polarity while overlooking the underlying emotional dimensions that shape sentiment expressions. This limitation hinders the model's ability to capture fine-grained affective signals toward specific aspect categories. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel emotion-enhanced multi-task ACSA framework that jointly learns sentiment polarity and category-specific emotions grounded in Ekman's six basic emotions. Leveraging the generative capabilities of LLMs, our approach enables the model to produce emotional descriptions for each aspect category, thereby enriching sentiment representations with affective expressions. Furthermore, to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the generated emotions, we introduce an emotion refinement mechanism based on the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) dimensional framework. Specifically, emotions predicted by the LLM are projected onto a VAD space, and those inconsistent with their corresponding VAD coordinates are re-annotated using a structured LLM-based refinement strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on all benchmark datasets. This underlines the effectiveness of integrating affective dimensions into ACSA.