Context-Aware Product Recommendations for Emerging Markets: a Sentiment-Driven LLM Approach

Sentiment analysis, in the context of digital banking reviews, aims to assess customer satisfaction and support service enhancement. Despite increasing attention to sentiment analysis across domains, Arabic banking reviews remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a dataset of 4922 Arabic reviews from three major Saudi digital banks with three sentiment categories positive, negative, or conflict—providing actionable insights for banks. We evaluate the dataset using several machine learning models and four large language models (LLMs)—GPT 3.5, GPT 4, Llama-3-8B-Instruct, and SILMA—using zero-shot (no labeled examples) and few-shot (a few labeled examples) learning strategies. Our results show that GPT 4 performs best among LLMs in few-shot settings, while traditional models still outperform LLMs, with a Voting Classifier achieving 90.24% accuracy. This study contributes a domain-specific dataset and comparative analysis to support research and practical improvements in Arabic digital banking services.

Aim/Purpose: This paper focuses on app review analysis techniques, driven by the rapid advancement of the mobile app market and NLP techniques in optimizing mobile app user experiences. Background: Owing to technological advancements, app review analysis has rapidly evolved. This study examines both conventional and emerging techniques, including current advancements such as large language models (LLMs) in app review analysis. It provides an overview of the various methods used across different categories of app review analysis, comparing effective strategies for identifying user concerns and enhancing app functionality. Methodology: A systematic review was utilized based on two major standard guidelines, PRISMA and Kitchenham’s guidelines, for the period of 2014 to 2024. After defining the review protocol, papers were identified through keyword-based searches on six major online databases: Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Science Direct, and Springer. Following screening and excluding papers based on defined quality criteria, 53 papers were considered for this study. The use of PRISMA ensures a transparent and reproducible review process, while Kitchenham’s guidelines provide a structured and rigorous approach for evaluating and synthesizing the literature. Contribution: This review study aims to evaluate the current state of knowledge on app review analysis techniques to improve mobile app user experiences. This study categorized the existing state-of-the-art papers into eight different categories, such as sentiment analysis, review classification, summarization, and prioritization, and examined challenges related to app review analysis. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the potential of LLMs for optimizing and automating app review analysis and provides future directions to address gaps in user-centric app development. Findings: Among the eight main categories defined in app review analysis, sentiment analysis is the most prevalent, followed by review classification and information extraction. Most studies use a combination of these categories to achieve a comprehensive goal. Prioritization techniques such as risk matrices, thumbs-up count-based approach, and anomaly detection are widely used to identify emerging issues. Extracting meaningful information and evaluating the proposed approach are the most common challenges identified. Novel LLMs, like Chat-GPT, significantly enhance review analysis by automating the process, improving feature extraction, and enabling context-aware review classification. Recommendations for Practitioners: The combination of conventional approaches and novel LLM-based methods can enhance both the efficiency and accuracy in identifying and addressing critical issues raised through mobile app user reviews. It effectively prioritizes user concerns by leveraging the strengths of both traditional preprocessing techniques and advanced LLMs. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers are encouraged to explore the integration of emerging technologies like LLMs to enhance the of app review analysis, particularly in feature-specific sentiment analysis. Impact on Society: The results of this study contribute to enhancing the mobile app user experience through effective app review analysis, which improves user satisfaction and supports user-centered app development. This ultimately leads to a better mobile app ecosystem, benefiting both users and developers. Future Research: In the future, this research can be extended in multiple directions. Researchers can address the existing research gaps that LLMs have yet to address, particularly in prioritizing user concerns. Additionally, there is potential for further research on tool implementations focusing on identifying persistent issues through time series analysis by considering the app version and date of the app reviews. Moreover, there is a need to develop comprehensive frameworks that are more generalizable across different apps and categories, with a focus on identifying user concerns related to specific features.

Sentiment analysis is a computational technique employed to extract and interpret subjective information from textual data. It involves the identification and classification of sentiments, opinions, and emotions expressed within the text. By analyzing linguistic cues, such as word choice, syntax, and sentiment lexicons, sentiment analysis can discern a range of emotions, from positive to negative, as well as more nuanced sentiments, such as anger, joy, or surprise. This powerful tool has the potential to unlock valuable insights from vast amounts of unstructured text data, which enables informed decision-making and effective communication in various domains, including education. Recent advances in sentiment analysis have leveraged the power of deep neural networks, particularly general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive labeled datasets. However, real-world applications frequently encounter challenges related to the availability of large, high-quality labeled data and the computational resources necessary for training such models. This research addresses these challenges by investigating effective strategies for utilizing LLMs in scenarios with limited data and computational resources. Specifically, this study explores three techniques: zero-shot learning, <i>N</i>-shot learning and fine-tuning. By evaluating these methods, this research aims to demonstrate the feasibility of employing general-purpose LLMs for sentiment analysis within educational contexts even when access to computational resources and labeled data is limited. The findings of this study reveal that different adaptation methods lead to significantly different LLM performance outcomes.

Background/Objective: Hypertension is the most prevalent chronic disease in primary care and a leading cause of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Despite existing guidelines, therapeutic inertia and suboptimal control persist. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential valuable addition to augment clinical decision-making, yet their reliability for guideline-driven tasks remains unverified. This study evaluated the accuracy and safety of hypertension management recommendations generated by three LLMs compared to expert responses. Methods: Fifty-one clinical vignettes representing 17 core hypertension management concepts were constructed by hypertension experts. Each case was submitted to three LLMs (GPT-4, Gemini, MedLM) and a hypertension expert also wrote the “gold standard” answers. Three blinded expert reviewers rated each response on a 4-point accuracy scale, a binary safety (safe/unsafe) scale, and attempted to identify the source (LLM vs. expert) providing the response. Ratings were analyzed using mean scores, percentages of accurate and safe responses, and inter-rater agreement. Results: GPT-4 had the highest accuracy (83%) and safety (86%) scores among LLMs but remained inferior to expert responses (92% accuracy, 93% safety). Gemini and MedLM performed significantly worse (accuracy: 64% and 35%; safety: 73% and 39%, respectively). GPT-4 generated the most guideline-concordant responses (46%) among the three LLMs (Gemini 35%, MedLM 14%), but remains lower than experts’ responses (68%). Evaluators misidentified LLM responses as expert-written in 10 to 25% of cases, particularly with GPT-4. Inter-rater reliability for accuracy ratings was highest for expert-generated responses (ICC 0.81), with progressively lower agreement for GPT-4 (0.76), Gemini (0.70), and MedLM (0.68). A similar pattern was observed for safety and source discrimination ratings. The agreement was strongest for safety assessments and weakest for source discrimination. Conclusion: Among three tested LLMs, GPT-4 demonstrated closer agreement to expert decisions thereby showing greater potential for supporting hypertension management. However, current LLMs’ versions frequently produce inaccurate or unsafe recommendations and remain inferior to expert judgment. Human-in-the-loop supervision remains essential when deploying LLMs for clinical decision-making.

UNSTRUCTURED Misleading information has significant implications for society but can have disastrous impact for health matters. Transformative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as large language models (LLMs) have the potential for limitless content generation (including fake), soon making internet information impossible to assess using traditional human approaches. We asked if the same LLMs (GPT4 and Gemini1-5-Pro) could be part of a more scalable solution. We tested 2 publicly available LLMs for their ability to identify misinformation in HealthReleases previously labeled by human experts. We found that simple prompts lead to overall low accuracy (F1 Macro 0,45 (GPT4) and 0,49 (Gemini1-5Pro)), but very different profiles for each LLM. Adding specific criteria used by experts to critically assess the Releases enhanced Gemini (0.66) but surprisingly reduced GPT4 (0,37) performances. We therefore developed a novel approach incorporating summaries of expert feedback into prompts and then observed major improvements in performance for both LLMs(GPT4;0.63 and Gemini1-5Pro; 0.96). Our study provides the first use case of LLMs as high throughput proofing of medical text, but more importantly provides insights into LLMs’ “truth biases”. We provide a novel paradigm integrating knowledge into the prompts which may reduce the need for LLM training, and the requirement for ever larger datasets and compute power. Importantly, we show how experts could and need to be involved in LLMs used to enhance their performance and potentially minimize the data wall issue.

Sentiment Analysis is a method to identify, extract, and quantify people's feelings, opinions, or attitudes. The wealth of online data motivates organizations to keep tabs on customers' opinions and feelings by turning to sentiment analysis tasks. Along with the sentiment analysis, the emotion analysis of written reviews is also essential to improve customer satisfaction with restaurant service. Due to the availability of massive online data, various computerized methods are proposed in the literature to decipher text sentiments. The majority of current methods rely on machine learning, which necessitates the pre-training of large datasets and incurs substantial space and time complexity. To address this issue, we propose a novel unsupervised sentiment classification model. This study presents an unsupervised mathematical optimization framework to perform sentiment and emotion analysis of reviews. The proposed model performs two tasks. First, it identifies a review's positive and negative sentiment polarities, and second, it determines customer satisfaction as either satisfactory or unsatisfactory based on a review. The framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, each review's context, rating, and emotion scores are combined to generate performance scores. In the second stage, we apply a non-cooperative game on performance scores and achieve Nash Equilibrium. The output from this step is the deduced sentiment of the review and the customer's satisfaction feedback. The experiments were performed on two restaurant review datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results. We validated and established the significance of the results through statistical analysis. The proposed model is domain and language-independent. The proposed model ensures rational and consistent results.

To analyze public perceptions of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids through sentiment and thematic analysis of online consumer reviews and their changes over time. Sentiment and thematic analysis. Online reviews from third-party and product websites. All English online consumer reviews posted between 2016 and 2024 for OTC hearing aids (83 models) were recorded (n = 21,727). Sentiment analysis was performed using Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner (VADER), a rule-based sentiment analysis tool incorporating natural language processing. VADER provides scores for each review ranging from -1 (most negative), 0 (neutral), to 1 (most positive). Additional thematic analysis was performed for the top 100 most positive, neutral, and negative reviews (n = 300). Overall, mean (SD) VADER sentiment score of online reviews was generally positive at 0.587 (0.411). Multivariable regression analysis showed that higher VADER scores were associated with higher-priced and behind-the-ear (BTE) type hearing aids. Although there was a significant increase in a number of reviews after the Food and Drug Administration's new establishment of the OTC hearing aid category in 2022, the mean sentiment scores slightly decreased (β =-.10, [95%CI: -0.12 to -0.09]). Thematic analysis revealed that positive sentiments highlighted the affordability and time-saving benefits of OTC hearing aids as alternatives to prescription models. Negative sentiments centered on sound quality, challenges with customer service, and inadequate amplification for those with severe hearing loss. Customers generally viewed OTC hearing aids positively, while mixed experiences were present. When used as indicated for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss, OTC hearing aids may offer a viable alternative to prescription devices, improving accessibility and affordability.

Background and Aims Large language models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the field of natural language processing (NLP), marking a shift from traditional techniques like Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). We developed a traditional NLP model to predict arteriovenous fistula (AVF) failure within next 30 days using clinical notes. The goal of this analysis was to investigate whether LLMs would outperform traditional NLP techniques, specifically in the context of predicting AVF failure within the next 30 days using clinical notes. Method We defined AVF failure as the change in status from active to permanently unusable status or temporarily unusable status. We used data from a large kidney care network from January 2021 to December 2021. Two models were created using LLMs and traditional TF-IDF technique. We used “distilbert-base-uncased”, a distilled version of BERT base model [1], and compared its performance with traditional TF-IDF-based NLP techniques. The dataset was randomly divided into 60% training, 20% validation and 20% test dataset. The test data, comprising of unseen patients’ data was used to evaluate the performance of the model. Both models were evaluated using metrics such as area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Results The incidence of 30 days AVF failure rate was 2.3% in the population. Both LLMs and traditional showed similar overall performance as summarized in Table 1. Notably, LLMs showed marginally better performance in certain evaluation metrics. Both models had same AUROC of 0.64 on test data. The accuracy and balanced accuracy for LLMs were 72.9% and 59.7%, respectively, compared to 70.9% and 59.6% for the traditional TF-IDF approach. In terms of specificity, LLMs scored 73.2%, slightly higher than the 71.2% observed for traditional NLP methods. However, LLMs had a lower sensitivity of 46.1% compared to 48% for traditional NLP. However, it is worth noting that training on LLMs took considerably longer than TF-IDF. Moreover, it also used higher computational resources such as utilization of graphics processing units (GPU) instances in cloud-based services, leading to higher cost. Conclusion In our study, we discovered that advanced LLMs perform comparably to traditional TF-IDF modeling techniques in predicting the failure of AVF. Both models demonstrated identical AUROC. While specificity was higher in LLMs compared to traditional NLP, sensitivity was higher in traditional NLP compared to LLMs. LLM was fine-tuned with a limited dataset, which could have influenced its performance to be similar to that of traditional NLP methods. This finding suggests that while LLMs may excel in certain scenarios, such as performing in-depth sentiment analysis of patient data for complex tasks, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the specific use case. It is crucial to weigh the benefits against the resources required for LLMs, as they can be significantly more resource-intensive and costly compared to traditional TF-IDF methods. This highlights the importance of a use-case-driven approach in selecting the appropriate NLP technique for healthcare applications.

The proliferation of social media has made Sentiment Analysis an essential tool for understanding user opinions, particularly in underrepresented language variants such as Mexican Spanish. Recent advances in Large Language Models have made effective sentiment analysis through in-context learning techniques, reducing the need for supervised training. This study compares the performance of zero and few-shot with traditional fine-tuning approaches of tourism-related texts in Mexican Spanish. Two annotated datasets from the REST-MEX 2022 and 2023 shared tasks were used for this purpose. Results show that fine-tuning, particularly with the MarIA model, achieves the best overall performance. However, modern LLMs that use in-context learning strategies, such as Mixtral 8x7B for zero-shot and Mistral 7B for few-shot, demonstrate strong potential in low-resource settings by closely approximating the accuracy of fine-tuned models, suggesting that in-context learning is a viable alternative to fine-tuning for sentiment analysis in Mexican Spanish when labeled data is limited. These approaches can enable intelligent, data-driven digital services with applications in tourism platforms and urban information systems that enhance user experience and trust in large-scale socio-technical ecosystems.

Sentiment analysis refers to the automated process of identifying the underlying emotional tone conveyed in a text. This task has become increasingly crucial today due to the exponential growth of opinion-oriented text generation on various online platforms including social media and e-commerce websites. The process of sentiment analysis has evolved through different phases like the use of handcrafted rules, sentiment-oriented dictionaries, machine learning, deep learning, transformer models, and large language models. These different phases have enriched the field of sentiment analysis and enabled it to get better insights into text for sentiment analysis. One of the most impactful developments in sentiment analysis was the creation of embedding’s for words or sentences, which are useful for representing unstructured data as structured data. These embedding are representing words or sentences as numerical vectors in a high-dimensional space and have proven effective in capturing the semantic relationships between words. By leveraging the power of embedding’s, sentiment analysis models can understand the complexities of human language and provide more precise insights into people's emotions and opinions. However, word embedding’s not inherently generated for sentiment analysis, which means that they are not inherently sentiment-oriented. Therefore, many researchers have focused on developing sentiment-oriented word embedding’s for sentiment words, but they have overlooked the importance of intensity words such as “little”, “high”, and “extremely”. These intensity words determine the level of sentiment expressed in text, which is particularly useful for fine-level sentiment analysis. To address this issue, a review proposes an intensity-aware word embedding development model and sentiment analysis with ML.

Since interpretable feature-engineered pipelines, natural language processing (NLP) has developed into deep neural and transformer-based architectures, and finally, large language models (LLMs) that can generalize their results across tasks. This development has significantly enhanced the subjective language comprehension, such as sentiment, emotion, sarcasm, humor, stance, metaphor, intent and aesthetic judgments, and increased the requirements of explainability in high-stakes areas. Already trained transformers (e.g., encoder-only and decoder-only versions) and LLMs like BERT and GPT have established powerful baselines on text classification and zero/few-shot subjectivity modeling, but the opaqueness of these models drives language-based rationalization (extractive/abstractive natural-language justifications) and feature-attribution algorithms (e.g., LIME, Integrated Gradients, SHAP). The four strands brought together by this survey include: (i) sentiment-analysis methods and datasets (e.g., IMDb, Sentiment140, Twitter Airline, SemEval), (ii) transformer-era text classification, (iii) LLMs on subjective language, and (iv) rationalization of explainable NLP. We have provided a unified taxonomy of subjective tasks and have analyzed model families, starting with classical ML up to transformers/LLMs; have collected major data sets and benchmarks; and have systematized explainability methods, in particular rationalization, and their evaluations and classify open problems dataset bias and annotation ambiguity, constraints of faithfulness and explanatory comprehensibility, evaluation bias, compute cost, and ethical risks. The article will facilitate the formation of a coherent foundation of explainable, credible subjective NLP based on the functions of transformer/LLM and analyze feature extraction techniques methodically based on LLM. We have trained a Machine Learning classifier using 70% of the training data and 30% of the testing data. Based on our results, we find that the proposed ML based technique gives enhanced performance, with an improved accuracy of 99% in the UCI-ML reviews dataset and 96% in the Twitter Kaggle dataset. This study underscores the paramount significance of feature extraction in sentiment analysis, endowing pragmatic insights to elevate model performance and steer future research pursuits.

Cross-category recommendation systems aim to suggest items to users from various categories, enhancing the user experience by broadening their exposure to diverse products or services. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for improving the effectiveness of such systems. LLMs, trained on vast datasets, excel at understanding complex relationships between different categories of products by analysing patterns in user interactions, preferences, and item descriptions. By leveraging natural language understanding, these models can identify similarities and connections between disparate product categories, enabling more personalized and relevant cross-category recommendations. This approach goes beyond traditional recommendation algorithms that typically focus on a single category or rely heavily on collaborative filtering techniques. Instead, LLMs can process and integrate information from multiple domains, making it easier to suggest complementary products from different categories that users may not have initially considered. Additionally, LLMs can interpret contextual information, such as user reviews and sentiment analysis, to further refine recommendations based on the user's unique preferences and behavioural patterns. The potential of LLMs in cross-category recommendations opens new possibilities for e-commerce, entertainment, and other industries where personalized experiences are key to user engagement and satisfaction. As these models continue to evolve, they offer the promise of more intelligent and comprehensive recommendation systems that can better meet the needs of users by offering diverse and relevant suggestions across categories. These abstract outlines the key role of LLMs in advancing cross-category recommendation systems, highlighting their capacity to improve personalization and broaden the scope of recommendations.

Sentiment analysis of online responses in the performing arts with large language models

Natural language processing (NLP) is being widely used globally for a variety of value-creation tasks ranging from chat-bots and machine translations to sentiment and topic analysis and multilingual large language models (LLMs). However, most of the advances are initially implemented within the English language framework, and it takes time and resources to develop comparable resources in other languages. The advances in machine translations have enabled the rapid and effective conversion of content in global languages into English and vice-versa. This creates potential opportunities to apply English language NLP methods and tools to other languages via machine translations. However, although this idea is powerful, it needs to be validated and processes and best practices need to be developed and kept updated. The present research is an effort to contribute to the development of best practices and an evaluation framework. We present a systematic and repeatable state-of-the-art process to evaluate the viability of applying English language sentiment analysis tools to Italian text by using multiple English language machine translation mechanisms such that it can be easily extended to other languages.

ABSTRACT: In today’s highly competitive job market, effective interview preparation plays a pivotal role in achieving career success. However, conventional preparation methods often fail to provide personalization, real-time feedback, and comprehensive performance assessment. To address these challenges, this research presents the AI-Driven Interview Assistant — an intelligent, adaptive, and comprehensive AI-powered interview preparation and assessment platform. The proposed system leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech analysis, and computer vision to simulate realistic interview environments while delivering actionable feedback and personalized improvement recommendations. The platform employs Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini for intelligent question generation and response evaluation. Real-time speech-to-text conversion using Google Speech-to-Text API or Whisper AI enables seamless voice interaction, while sentiment analysis with Hugging Face transformers evaluates emotional tone, confidence, and engagement. The core evaluation engine analyzes responses based on content relevance, communication clarity, technical accuracy, and behavioral competence. Optional computer vision modules assess facial expressions and body language for holistic performance insights. From a technical standpoint, the system is built with a React.js frontend and Node.js/Express backend, ensuring a smooth, interactive user experience. WebRTC integration enables live audio-video interview simulations, while MongoDB or PostgreSQL store detailed performance analytics for adaptive learning. The platform also integrates with job portals and company databases to deliver role-specific and industry-oriented interview preparation. Keywords – Artificial Intelligence (AI), Interview Preparation, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), Speech Recognition, Whisper AI, Sentiment Analysis, Hugging Face Transformers, Computer Vision, Adaptive Learning, Real-time Feedback, Emotion Detection, React.js, Node.js, WebRTC, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Interview Simulation, Candidate Assessment, Skill Enhancement