YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2020 Task 8: Using a Parallel-Channel Model for Memotion Analysis
This work addresses the challenge of classifying memes for social media analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like BERT and CNNs for a specific competition task.
The paper tackled sentiment analysis of internet memes by proposing a parallel-channel model that processes textual and visual information, achieving nineteenth place in a SemEval-2020 subtask with performance better than the baseline algorithm.
In recent years, the growing ubiquity of Internet memes on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, has become a topic of immense interest. However, the classification and recognition of memes is much more complicated than that of social text since it involves visual cues and language understanding. To address this issue, this paper proposed a parallel-channel model to process the textual and visual information in memes and then analyze the sentiment polarity of memes. In the shared task of identifying and categorizing memes, we preprocess the dataset according to the language behaviors on social media. Then, we adapt and fine-tune the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and two types of convolutional neural network models (CNNs) were used to extract the features from the pictures. We applied an ensemble model that combined the BiLSTM, BIGRU, and Attention models to perform cross domain suggestion mining. The officially released results show that our system performs better than the baseline algorithm. Our team won nineteenth place in subtask A (Sentiment Classification). The code of this paper is availabled at : https://github.com/YuanLi95/Semveal2020-Task8-emotion-analysis.