Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Addressing Key Issues and Setting up Baselines

Sentiment analysis is proven to be very useful tool in many applications regarding social media. This has led to a great surge of research in this field. Hence, in this paper, we compile the baselines for such research. In this paper, we explore three different deep-learning based architectures for multimodal sentiment classification, each improving upon the previous. Further, we evaluate these architectures with multiple datasets with fixed train/test partition. We also discuss some major issues, frequently ignored in multimodal sentiment analysis research, e.g., role of speaker-exclusive models, importance of different modalities, and generalizability. This framework illustrates the different facets of analysis to be considered while performing multimodal sentiment analysis and, hence, serves as a new benchmark for future research in this emerging field. We draw a comparison among the methods using empirical data, obtained from the experiments. In the future, we plan to focus on extracting semantics from visual features, cross-modal features and fusion.