M3SA: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based on Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Multi-Task Learning

Sentiment analysis plays an indispensable part in human-computer interaction. Multimodal sentiment analysis can overcome the shortcomings of unimodal sentiment analysis by fusing multimodal data. However, how to extracte improved feature representations and how to execute effective modality fusion are two crucial problems in multimodal sentiment analysis. Traditional work uses simple sub-models for feature extraction, and they ignore features of different scales and fuse different modalities of data equally, making it easier to incorporate extraneous information and affect analysis accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Multimodal Sentiment Analysis model based on Multi-scale feature extraction and Multi-task learning (M $^{3}$ SA). First, we propose a multi-scale feature extraction method that models the outputs of different hidden layers with the method of channel attention. Second, a multimodal fusion strategy based on the key modality is proposed, which utilizes the attention mechanism to raise the proportion of the key modality and mines the relationship between the key modality and other modalities. Finally, we use the multi-task learning approach to train the proposed model, ensuring that the model can learn better feature representations. Experimental results on two publicly available multimodal sentiment analysis datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and that the proposed model outperforms baselines.