Self-Supervised Learning for Sentiment Analysis via Image-Text Matching

There is often a resemblance in the sentiment expressed in social media posts (text) and their accompanying images. In this paper, We leverage this sentiment congruence for self-supervised representation learning for sentiment analysis. By teaching the model to pair an image with its corresponding social media post, the model can learn a representation capturing sentiment features from the image and text without supervision. We then use the pre-trained encoder for feature extraction for sentiment analysis in downstream tasks. We show significant improvement and good transferability for sentiment classification in addition to robustness in performance when available data decreases on public datasets (B-T4SA and IMDb Movie Review). With this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of self-supervised learning through cross-modal matching for sentiment analysis.