Modality-Dependent Sentiments Exploring for Multi-Modal Sentiment Classification

Recognizing human feelings from image and text is a core challenge of multi-modal data analysis, often applied in personalized advertising. Previous works aim at exploring the shared features, which are the matched contents between images and texts. However, the modality-dependent sentiment information (private features) in each modality is usually ignored by cross-modal interactions, the real sentiment is often reflected in one modality. In this paper, we propose a Modality-Dependent Sentiment Exploring framework (MDSE). First, to exploit the private features, we compare shared features with original image or text features, identifying previously overlooked unimodal features. Fusing the private and shared features can make the model more robust. Second, in order to obtain unified sentiment representations, we treat unimodal features and multi-modal fused features equally. We introduce a Modality-Agnostic Contrastive Loss (MACL) that performs contrastive learning between unimodal features and multi-modal fused features. The MACL can fully exploit sentiment information from multi-modal data and reduce the modality gap. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDSE compared with existing methods. The full codes are available at https://github.com/royal-dargon/MDSE.