Global Local Fusion Neural Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

With the popularity of social networking services, people are increasingly inclined to share their opinions and feelings on social networks, leading to the rapid increase in multimodal posts on various platforms. Therefore, multimodal sentiment analysis has become a crucial research field for exploring users’ emotions. The complex and complementary interactions between images and text greatly heighten the difficulty of sentiment analysis. Previous works conducted rough fusion operations and ignored the study for fine fusion features for the sentiment task, which did not obtain sufficient interactive information for sentiment analysis. This paper proposes a global local fusion neural network (GLFN), which comprehensively considers global and local fusion features, aggregating these features to analyze user sentiment. The model first extracts overall fusion features by attention modules as modality-based global features. Then, coarse-to-fine fusion learning is applied to build local fusion features effectively. Specifically, the cross-modal module is used for rough fusion, and fine-grained fusion is applied to capture the interaction information between objects and words. Finally, we integrate all features to achieve a more reliable prediction. Extensive experimental results, comparisons, and visualization of public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for multimodal sentiment classification.