Are You Sure You’re Positive? Consolidating Chain-of-Thought Agents with Uncertainty Quantification for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis

Filippos Ventirozos, Peter A. Appleby, Matthew Shardlow


Abstract
Aspect-category sentiment analysis provides granular insights by identifying specific themes within product reviews that are associated with particular opinions. Supervised learning approaches dominate the field. However, data is scarce and expensive to annotate for new domains. We argue that leveraging large language models in a zero-shot setting is beneficial where the time and resources required for dataset annotation are limited. Furthermore, annotation bias may lead to strong results using supervised methods but transfer poorly to new domains in contexts that lack annotations and demand reproducibility. In our work, we propose novel techniques that combine multiple chain-of-thought agents by leveraging large language models’ token-level uncertainty scores. We experiment with the 3B and 70B+ parameter size variants of Llama and Qwen models, demonstrating how these approaches can fulfil practical needs and opening a discussion on how to gauge accuracy in label-scarce conditions.
Anthology ID:
2025.realm-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop for Research on Agent Language Models (REALM 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Ehsan Kamalloo, Nicolas Gontier, Xing Han Lu, Nouha Dziri, Shikhar Murty, Alexandre Lacoste
Venues:
REALM | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
309–326
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.realm-1.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Filippos Ventirozos, Peter A. Appleby, and Matthew Shardlow. 2025. Are You Sure You’re Positive? Consolidating Chain-of-Thought Agents with Uncertainty Quantification for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop for Research on Agent Language Models (REALM 2025), pages 309–326, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are You Sure You’re Positive? Consolidating Chain-of-Thought Agents with Uncertainty Quantification for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (Ventirozos et al., REALM 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.realm-1.22.pdf