Sentiment analysis of online user generated content is important for many
social media analytics tasks. Researchers have largely relied on textual
sentiment analysis to develop systems to predict political elections, measure
economic indicators, and so on. Recently, social media users are increasingly
using images and videos to express their opinions and share their experiences.
Sentiment analysis of such large scale visual content can help better extract
user sentiments toward events or topics, such as those in image tweets, so that
prediction of sentiment from visual content is complementary to textual
sentiment analysis. Motivated by the needs in leveraging large scale yet noisy
training data to solve the extremely challenging problem of image sentiment
analysis, we employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first design a
suitable CNN architecture for image sentiment analysis. We obtain half a
million training samples by using a baseline sentiment algorithm to label
Flickr images. To make use of such noisy machine labeled data, we employ a
progressive strategy to fine-tune the deep network. Furthermore, we improve the
performance on Twitter images by inducing domain transfer with a small number
of manually labeled Twitter images. We have conducted extensive experiments on
manually labeled Twitter images. The results show that the proposed CNN can
achieve better performance in image sentiment analysis than competing
algorithms.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, AAAI 201
