Zhongzheng Wang
Author directory2026
Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Dependency-guided Large Language Model
Zhongzheng Wang | Yuanhe Tian | Hongzhi Wang | Yan Song
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)
Zhongzheng Wang | Yuanhe Tian | Hongzhi Wang | Yan Song
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)
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.