Predicting viewer affective comments based on image content in social media

Visual sentiment analysis is getting increasing attention be-cause of the rapidly growing amount of images in online so-cial interactions and several emerging applications such as online propaganda and advertisement. Recent studies have shown promising progress in analyzing visual affect concepts intended by the media content publisher. In contrast, this paper focuses on predicting what viewer affect concepts will be triggered when the image is perceived by the viewers. For example, given an image tagged with “yummy food,” the viewers are likely to comment “delicious ” and “hungry,” which we refer to as viewer affect concepts (VAC) in this pa-per. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work ex-plicitly distinguishing intended publisher affect concepts and induced viewer affect concepts associated with social visual content, and aiming at understanding their correlations. We present around 400 VACs automatically mined from million-scale real user comments associated with images in social media. Furthermore, we propose an automatic visual based approach to predict VACs by first detecting publisher af-fect concepts in image content and then applying statisti-cal correlations between such publisher affect concepts and the VACs. We demonstrate major benefits of the proposed methods in several real-world tasks- recommending images to invoke certain target VACs among viewers, increasing the accuracy of predicting VACs by 20.1 % and finally developing a social assistant tool that may suggest plausible, content-specific and desirable comments when users view new im-ages