CrisisKD: Five-Stage Knowledge Distillation for Aspect-Level Sentiment and Emotion Analysis in Crisis Discourse

Abstract

Identifying the target of emotional words or phrases in crisis situations, especially health-related ones, is important for understanding public concerns across cultural and linguistic contexts. We propose CrisisKD, a five-stage teacher--student knowledge distillation framework for aspect-level sentiment and emotion analysis on unannotated social media data. A teacher LLM generates aspect-level labels and reasoning traces that supervise a smaller student model across aspect extraction, syntactic parsing, opinion extraction, sentiment classification, and emotion classification. Using this framework, we construct and release a dataset containing 50,615 aspect-level labels, together with the annotation and fine-tuning scripts as open-source resources. The resulting student supports end-to-end ABSA and emotion detection at substantially lower inference cost than the teacher. On a manually annotated 500-tweet gold set, the 5-task Qwen2.5-7B student improves over the untuned model by 7.9 F1 points on aspect extraction, 17.0 points on emotion accuracy, and 6.5 points on sentiment accuracy. On the external ABEA benchmark, CrisisKD improves the same-model Qwen2.5-7B ICL baseline by 2.8 F1 points on ATE and 3.8 F1 points on joint ATE+AEC.