Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Dependency-guided Large Language Model

Abstract:Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to identify aspect-level sentiments by jointly modeling textual and visual information, which is essential for fine-grained opinion understanding in social media. Existing approaches mainly rely on discriminative classification with complex multimodal fusion, yet they lack explicit sentiment explainability. In this paper, we reformulate MABSA as a generative and explainable task, proposing a unified framework that simultaneously predicts aspect-level sentiment and generates natural language explanations. Based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs), our approach employs a prompt-based generative paradigm, jointly producing sentiment and explanation. To further enhance aspect-oriented reasoning capabilities, we propose a dependency-syntax-guided sentiment cue strategy. This strategy prunes and textualizes the aspect-centered dependency syntax tree, guiding the model to distinguish different sentiment aspects and enhancing its explainability. To enable explainability, we use MLLMs to construct explanation-augmented datasets for fine-tuning. Experiments show that our approach not only achieves overall gains in sentiment classification accuracy, but also produces coherent and aspect-grounded explanations.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2601.06848 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2601.06848v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.06848 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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