NTDH: Complex Reasoning for Comprehensive Affective Analysis

Researchers propose NTDH, a complex-reasoning framework for comprehensive affective analysis that unifies sentiment and emotion tasks under one output interface and a verifiable reward trajectory. Trained on 16,302 records with Qwen3-8B using SFT and GRPO, NTDH improves over its SFT checkpoint on five of six official-test metrics and achieves the strongest EI-reg result among compared systems, with a Pearson correlation of 0.862.

arXiv:2608.06425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comprehensive affective analysis is challenging for two reasons: it spans heterogeneous prediction tasks with continuous, ordinal, and multi-label outputs, and affective meaning is context-dependent, requiring conflicting cues to be reconciled rather than mapped directly to labels. Existing methods learn this mapping directly and do not model the reconciliation explicitly. We recast the task as a complex-reasoning problem, which yields one output interface across heterogeneous label spaces and a trajectory over which a verifiable reward can be optimised; to our knowledge, this is the first such treatment covering both sentiment and emotion. The obstacle is on the data side: affective reasoning traces must be synthesised, and generic synthesis is misaligned with the targets, tolerances, and phenomena of affect, and discards or leaks its failure cases. We propose NTDH, which addresses these four failures. Naturalisation sets the training answer to the gold label, so it is correct by construction. A Tolerance-aware gate checks each answer against the task's own scoring margin. Domain-aware strategies refine the reasoning using ideas from affective science. Directional Hints report only the type and direction of an error, without exposing the target. We train Qwen3-8B with SFT and then GRPO under the same tolerance used for verification up to a more permissive construction gate on the multi-label subtask , and a component ablation quantifies the data-quality effect of each part. Using 16,302 training records, about 14x fewer than comparable instruction-tuned systems, the final policy improves over its SFT checkpoint on five of six official-test metrics and achieves the strongest EI-reg result among the compared systems, at a Pearson correlation of 0.862.