BIT: Improving Image-text Sentiment Analysis via Learning Bidirectional Image-text Interaction

Exploring the interaction between image and text has a great strength for image-text sentiment analysis. However, most methods only focus on learning forward interaction in forward image-text features and fail to capture the backward interaction in backward image-text features, which leads to the loss of necessary information embedded in backward interaction. In this paper, Bidirectional Interaction Transformer (BIT) that models both forward and backward image-text interactions is proposed for image-text sentiment analysis. Specifically, we first encode image and text to forward and backward features. Then, these features are fed into Bidirectional Interaction Encoder (BIE) with Forward Interaction and Back Interaction branches to model bidirectional (i.e., forward and backward) image-text interaction. Finally, Two-scale Adaptive Gating Fusion (TAGF) is designed to adaptively fuse the forward and backward interactions learned by BIE. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.