Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2022

Abstract

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to recognize people's attitudes from multiple communication channels such as verbal content (i.e., text), voice, and facial expressions. It has become a vibrant and important research topic in natural language processing. Much research focuses on modeling the complex intra- and inter-modal interactions between different communication channels. However, current multimodal models with strong performance are often deep-learning-based techniques and work like black boxes. It is not clear how models utilize multimodal information for sentiment predictions. Despite recent advances in techniques for enhancing the explainability of machine learning models, they often target unimodal scenarios (e.g., images, sentences), and little research has been done on explaining multimodal models. In this paper, we present an interactive visual analytics system, M2 Lens, to visualize and explain multimodal models for sentiment analysis. M2 Lens provides explanations on intra- and inter-modal interactions at the global, subset, and local levels. Specifically, it summarizes the influence of three typical interaction types (i.e., dominance, complement, and conflict) on the model predictions. Moreover, M2 Lens identifies frequent and influential multimodal features and supports the multi-faceted exploration of model behaviors from language, acoustic, and visual modalities. Through two case studies and expert interviews, we demonstrate our system can help users gain deep insights into the multimodal models for sentiment analysis.

Keywords

Multimodal models, sentiment analysis, explainable machine learning

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Research Areas

Data Science and Engineering

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Volume

28

Issue

1

First Page

802

Last Page

812

ISSN

1077-2626

Identifier

10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114794

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114794

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