Automatic detection of consumers’ complaints about items or services they buy can be critical for organizations and online merchants. Previous studies on complaint identification are limited to text. Images along with the reviews can provide cues to identify complaints better, thus emphasizing the importance of incorporating multi-modal inputs into the process. Generally, the customer’s emotional state significantly impacts the complaint expression; thus, the effect of emotion and sentiment on complaint identification must also be investigated. Furthermore, different organizations are usually not allowed to share their privacy-sensitive records due to data security and privacy concerns. Due to these issues, traditional models find it hard to understand and identify complaint patterns, particularly in the financial and healthcare sectors. In this work, we created a new dataset - Multi-modal Complaint Dataset (MCD), a collection of reviews and images of the products posted on the website of the retail giant Amazon. We propose a federated meta-learning-based multi-modal multi-task framework for identifying complaints considering emotion recognition and sentiment analysis as two auxiliary tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the baselines and the state-of-the-art approaches in centralized and federated meta-learning settings.

Complaining is an illocutionary act in which the speaker communicates his/her dissatisfaction with a set of circumstances and holds the hearer (the complainee) answerable, directly or indirectly. Considering breakthroughs in machine learning approaches, the complaint detection task has piqued the interest of the natural language processing (NLP) community. Most of the earlier studies failed to justify their findings, necessitating the adoption of interpretable models that can explain the model’s output in real time. We introduce an explainable complaint dataset, X-CI, the first benchmark dataset for explainable complaint detection. Each instance in the X-CI dataset is annotated with five labels: complaint label, emotion label, polarity label, complaint severity level, and rationale (explainability), i.e., the causal span explaining the reason for the complaint/non-complaint label. We address the task of explainable complaint detection and propose a commonsense-aware unified generative framework by reframing the multitask problem as a text-to-text generation task. Our framework can predict the complaint cause, severity level, emotion, and polarity of the text in addition to detecting whether it is a complaint or not. We further establish the advantages of our proposed model on various evaluation metrics over the state-of-the-art models and other baselines when applied to the X-CI dataset in both full and few-shot settings.