Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Dependency-guided Large Language Model

Zhongzheng Wang, Yuanhe Tian, Hongzhi Wang, Yan Song


Abstract
Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to identify aspect-level sentiments by jointly modeling textual and visual information, which is essential for fine-grained opinion understanding in social media. Existing approaches mainly rely on discriminative classification with complex multimodal fusion, yet lacking explicit sentiment explainability. In this paper, we reformulate MABSA as a generative and explainable task, proposing a unified framework that simultaneously predicts aspect-level sentiment and generates natural language explanations. Based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs), our approach employs a prompt-based generative paradigm, jointly producing sentiment and explanation. To further enhance aspect-oriented reasoning capabilities, we propose a dependency-syntax-guided sentiment cue strategy. This strategy prunes and textualizes the aspect-centered dependency syntax tree, guiding the model to distinguish different sentiment aspects and enhancing its explainability. To enable explainability, we use MLLMs to construct new datasets with sentiment explanations to fine-tune. Experiments show that our approach not only achieves consistent gains in sentiment classification accuracy, but also produces faithful, aspect-grounded explanations.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.201
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4451–4465
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.201/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhongzheng Wang, Yuanhe Tian, Hongzhi Wang, and Yan Song. 2026. Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Dependency-guided Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4451–4465, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Dependency-guided Large Language Model (Wang et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.201.pdf