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Main Authors: Liu, Brian, Jones, Oiwi Parker
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18792
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author Liu, Brian
Jones, Oiwi Parker
author_facet Liu, Brian
Jones, Oiwi Parker
contents Decoding emotion from brain activity could unlock a deeper understanding of the human experience. While a number of existing datasets align brain data with speech and with speech transcripts, no datasets have annotated brain data with sentiment. To bridge this gap, we explore the use of pre-trained Text-to-Sentiment models to annotate non invasive brain recordings, acquired using magnetoencephalography (MEG), while participants listened to audiobooks. Having annotated the text, we employ force-alignment of the text and audio to align our sentiment labels with the brain recordings. It is straightforward then to train Brainto-Sentiment models on these data. Experimental results show an improvement in balanced accuracy for Brain-to-Sentiment compared to baseline, supporting the proposed approach as a proof-of-concept for leveraging existing MEG datasets and learning to decode sentiment directly from the brain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MEGnifying Emotion: Sentiment Analysis from Annotated Brain Data
Liu, Brian
Jones, Oiwi Parker
Human-Computer Interaction
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Decoding emotion from brain activity could unlock a deeper understanding of the human experience. While a number of existing datasets align brain data with speech and with speech transcripts, no datasets have annotated brain data with sentiment. To bridge this gap, we explore the use of pre-trained Text-to-Sentiment models to annotate non invasive brain recordings, acquired using magnetoencephalography (MEG), while participants listened to audiobooks. Having annotated the text, we employ force-alignment of the text and audio to align our sentiment labels with the brain recordings. It is straightforward then to train Brainto-Sentiment models on these data. Experimental results show an improvement in balanced accuracy for Brain-to-Sentiment compared to baseline, supporting the proposed approach as a proof-of-concept for leveraging existing MEG datasets and learning to decode sentiment directly from the brain.
title MEGnifying Emotion: Sentiment Analysis from Annotated Brain Data
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18792