Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with External Knowledge and Multi-granularity Image-Text Features

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) is an essential task in the field of sentiment analysis, which still confronts several critical challenges. The first challenge is how to effectively capture key information within both image and text features to enhance the recognition and understanding of complex sentiment expressions. The second challenge is how to achieve cross-modal alignment of multi-granularity text features and image features. The third challenge is how to narrow the semantic gap between image modality and text modality through effective cross-modal feature fusion. To address these issues, a framework that leverages external knowledge and multi-granularity image and text features (EKMG) is proposed. Firstly, an external knowledge enhanced semantic extraction module is introduced to fuse external knowledge with image features and text features, thereby capturing the key information from texts and images. Secondly, we design a multi-granularity image-text contrastive learning module. This module initially introduces a graph attention network and a novel cross-modal fusion mechanism to align image features and text features at multiple granularities. Additionally, the module employs an image-text contrastive learning strategy to narrow the semantic gap between different modalities. Experimental results on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that EKMG achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art baseline models.