UsbVisdaNet: User Behavior Visual Distillation and Attention Network for Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Sensors (Basel). 2023 May 17;23(10):4829. doi: 10.3390/s23104829.

Abstract

In sentiment analysis, biased user reviews can have a detrimental impact on a company's evaluation. Therefore, identifying such users can be highly beneficial as their reviews are not based on reality but on their characteristics rooted in their psychology. Furthermore, biased users may be seen as instigators of other prejudiced information on social media. Thus, proposing a method to help detect polarized opinions in product reviews would offer significant advantages. This paper proposes a new method for sentiment classification of multimodal data, which is called UsbVisdaNet (User Behavior Visual Distillation and Attention Network). The method aims to identify biased user reviews by analyzing their psychological behaviors. It can identify both positive and negative users and improves sentiment classification results that may be skewed due to subjective biases in user opinions by leveraging user behavior information. Through ablation and comparison experiments, the effectiveness of UsbVisdaNet is demonstrated, achieving superior sentiment classification performance on the Yelp multimodal dataset. Our research pioneers the integration of user behavior features, text features, and image features at multiple hierarchical levels within this domain.

Keywords: multimodal sentiment classification; user behavior attention; visual attention.