Emotion meets coordination: Designing multi-agent LLMs for fine-grained user sentiment detection on social media

Social media platforms have become central channels for emotional communication, posing new challenges for fine-grained sentiment analysis due to their high contextual variability, multimodal content, and pervasive ambiguity. Traditional end-to-end sentiment models often struggle to capture compositional or conflicting emotional cues in user-generated texts. This study presents a modular multi-agent architecture for sentiment analysis, implemented with the LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct model and guided by system-level design principles. The framework decomposes emotion inference into three coordinated stages, perception, reasoning, and resolution, each managed by a specialized agent trained with parameter-efficient tuning strategies. A meta-agent mediates conflicting predictions through a coordination protocol based on confidence estimation and discourse consistency, enabling adaptive consensus formation. Evaluations on the GoEmotions v2, SemEval-2024, and Twitter benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed system achieves higher accuracy, robustness, and interpretability compared with existing baselines. These findings indicate that architectural decomposition combined with collaborative reasoning enhances reliability and transparency in sentiment analysis, offering a scalable pathway toward intelligent and emotionally aware computational systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
PLoS ONE
Published
2026-02-09
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0342053
Primary Topic
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Emotion meets coordination: Designing multi-agent LLMs for fine-grained user sentiment detection on social media

Muze Li, Zhengfeng Yang, Hao Dong, Zuowen Bao
PLoS ONE
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
article

Emotion meets coordination: Designing multi-agent LLMs for fine-grained user sentiment detection on social media

Muze Li, Zhengfeng Yang, Hao Dong, Zuowen Bao
article en

Abstract

Social media platforms have become central channels for emotional communication, posing new challenges for fine-grained sentiment analysis due to their high contextual variability, multimodal content, and pervasive ambiguity. Traditional end-to-end sentiment models often struggle to capture compositional or conflicting emotional cues in user-generated texts. This study presents a modular multi-agent architecture for sentiment analysis, implemented with the LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct model and guided by system-level design principles. The framework decomposes emotion inference into three coordinated stages, perception, reasoning, and resolution, each managed by a specialized agent trained with parameter-efficient tuning strategies. A meta-agent mediates conflicting predictions through a coordination protocol based on confidence estimation and discourse consistency, enabling adaptive consensus formation. Evaluations on the GoEmotions v2, SemEval-2024, and Twitter benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed system achieves higher accuracy, robustness, and interpretability compared with existing baselines. These findings indicate that architectural decomposition combined with collaborative reasoning enhances reliability and transparency in sentiment analysis, offering a scalable pathway toward intelligent and emotionally aware computational systems.

PLoS ONEVol. 21(2)
Jiangsu Second Normal University (CN), Hanyang University (KR), Sungkyunkwan University (KR), Anyang University (KR)
Openalex Percentile: Top 63%
Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
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