Hongfei Du
2026
AffectCodec: Emotion-Preserving Neural Speech Codec for Expressive Speech Modeling
Jiacheng Shi | Hongfei Du | Xinyuan Song | Y. Alicia Hong | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jiacheng Shi | Hongfei Du | Xinyuan Song | Y. Alicia Hong | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Neural speech codecs provide discrete representations for speech language models, but emotional cues are often degraded during quantization. Existing codecs mainly optimize acoustic reconstruction, leaving emotion expressiveness insufficiently modeled at the representation level. We propose an emotion-guided neural speech codec that explicitly preserves emotional information while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness. Our framework combines emotion–semantic guided latent modulation, relation-preserving emotional–semantic distillation, and emotion-weighted semantic alignment to retain emotionally salient cues under compression. Extensive evaluations across speech reconstruction, emotion recognition, and downstream text to speech generation demonstrate improved emotion consistency and perceptual quality without sacrificing content accuracy.
2025
Role-Guided Annotation and Prototype-Aligned Representation Learning for Historical Literature Sentiment Classification
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Jacobo Myerston | Sidi Lu | Gang Zhou | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Jacobo Myerston | Sidi Lu | Gang Zhou | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Sentiment analysis of historical literature provides valuable insights for humanities research, yet remains challenging due to scarce annotations and limited generalization of models trained on modern texts. Prior work has primarily focused on two directions: using sentiment lexicons or leveraging large language models (LLMs) for annotation. However, lexicons are often unavailable for historical texts due to limited linguistic resources, and LLM-generated labels often reflect modern sentiment norms and fail to capture the implicit, ironic, or morally nuanced expressions typical of historical literature, resulting in noisy supervision. To address these issues, we introduce a role-guided annotation strategy that prompts LLMs to simulate historically situated perspectives when labeling sentiment. Furthermore, we design a prototype-aligned framework that learns sentiment prototypes from high-resource data and aligns them with low-resource representations via symmetric contrastive loss, improving robustness to noisy labels. Experiments across multiple historical literature datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness.