A Survey of Cutting-edge Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

The rapid growth of the internet has reached the fourth generation, i.e., web 4.0, which supports Sentiment Analysis (SA) in many applications such as social media, marketing, risk management, healthcare, businesses, websites, data mining, e-learning, psychology, and many more. Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool for governments, businesses, and researchers to analyse users’ emotions and mental states in order to generate opinions and reviews about products, services, and daily activities. In the past years, several SA techniques based on Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and other soft computing approaches were proposed. However, growing data size, subjectivity, and diversity pose a significant challenge to enhancing the efficiency of existing techniques and incorporating current development trends, such as Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) and fusion techniques. With the aim of assisting the enthusiastic researcher to navigating the current trend, this article presents a comprehensive study of various literature to handle different aspects of SA, including current trends and techniques across multiple domains. In order to clarify the future prospects of MSA, this article also highlights open issues and research directions that lead to a number of unresolved challenges.