Hu Huang
2025
SPARK: Simulating the Co-evolution of Stance and Topic Dynamics in Online Discourse with LLM-based Agents
Bowen Zhang
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Yi Yang
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Fuqiang Niu
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Xianghua Fu
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Genan Dai
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Hu Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Topic evolution and stance dynamics are deeply intertwined in online social media, shaping the fragmentation and polarization of public discourse. Yet existing dynamic topic models and stance analysis approaches usually consider these processes in isolation, relying on abstractions that lack interpretability and agent-level behavioral fidelity. We present stance and topic evolution reasoning framework (SPARK), the first LLM-based multi-agent simulation framework for jointly modeling the co-evolution of topics and stances through natural language interactions. In SPARK, each agent is instantiated as an LLM persona with unique demographic and psychological traits, equipped with memory and reflective reasoning. Agents engage in daily conversations, adapt their stances, and organically introduce emergent subtopics, enabling interpretable, fine-grained simulation of discourse dynamics at scale. Experiments across five real-world domains show that SPARK captures key empirical patterns—such as rapid topic innovation in technology, domain-specific stance polarization, and the influence of personality on stance shifts and topic emergence. Our framework quantitatively reveals the bidirectional mechanisms by which stance shifts and topic evolution reinforce each other, a phenomenon rarely addressed in prior work. SPARK provides actionable insights and a scalable tool for understanding and mitigating polarization in online discourse. Code and simulation resources will be released after acceptance.
2022
Sentiment Interpretable Logic Tensor Network for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis
Bowen Zhang
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Xu Huang
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Zhichao Huang
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Hu Huang
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Baoquan Zhang
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Xianghua Fu
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Liwen Jing
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) is an important task that aims to infer the sentiment towards the given aspect-terms. It is often required in the industry that ATSA should be performed with interpretability, computational efficiency and high accuracy. However, such an ATSA method has not yet been developed. This study aims to develop an ATSA method that fulfills all these requirements. To achieve the goal, we propose a novel Sentiment Interpretable Logic Tensor Network (SILTN). SILTN is interpretable because it is a neurosymbolic formalism and a computational model that supports learning and reasoning about data with a differentiable first-order logic language (FOL). To realize SILTN with high inferring accuracy, we propose a novel learning strategy called the two-stage syntax knowledge distillation (TSynKD). Using widely used datasets, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed TSynKD is effective for improving the accuracy of SILTN, and the SILTN has both high interpretability and computational efficiency.
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- Xianghua Fu 2
- Bowen Zhang 2
- Genan Dai 1
- Xu Huang 1
- Zhichao Huang 1
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