RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Junjie Ye, Jie Zhou, Junfeng Tian, Rui Wang, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
Recently, Target-oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) has gained significant attention among scholars. However, current multimodal models have reached a performance bottleneck. To investigate the causes of this problem, we perform extensive empirical evaluation and in-depth analysis of the datasets to answer the following questions: **Q1**: Are the modalities equally important for TMSC? **Q2**: Which multimodal fusion modules are more effective? **Q3**: Do existing datasets adequately support the research? Our experiments and analyses reveal that the current TMSC systems primarily rely on the textual modality, as most of targets’ sentiments can be determined *solely* by text. Consequently, we point out several directions to work on for the TMSC task in terms of model design and dataset construction. The code and data can be found in https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/RethinkingTMSC.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.21
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
270–277
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.21
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.21
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junjie Ye, Jie Zhou, Junfeng Tian, Rui Wang, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, and Xuanjing Huang. 2023. RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 270–277, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (Ye et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.21.pdf