A Method with Universal Transformer for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to use a variety of sensors to obtain and process information to predict the intensity and polarity of human emotions. The main challenges faced by current multi-modal sentiment analysis include: how the model extracts emotional information in a single modality and realizes the complementary transmission of multimodal information; how to output relatively stable predictions even when the sentiment embodied in a single modality is inconsistent with the multi-modal label; how can the model ensure high accuracy when a single modal information is incomplete or the feature extraction performance not good. Traditional methods do not take into account the interaction of unimodal contextual information and multi-modal information. They also ignore the independence and correlation of different modalities, which perform poorly when multimodal sentiment representations are asymmetric. To address these issues, this paper first proposes unimodal feature extraction network (UFEN) to extract unimodal features with stronger representation capabilities; then introduces multi-task fusion network (MTFN) to improve the correlation and fusion effect between multiple modalities. Multilayer feature extraction, attention mechanisms and Transformer are used in the model to mine potential relationships between features. Experimental results on MOSI, MOSEI and SIMS datasets show that the proposed method achieves better performance on multimodal sentiment analysis tasks compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition represent a major research direction in natural language processing (NLP). With the rapid development of online media, people often express their emotions on a topic in the form of video, and the signals it transmits are multimodal, including language, visual, and audio. Therefore, the traditional unimodal sentiment analysis method is no longer applicable, which requires the establishment of a fusion model of multimodal information to obtain sentiment understanding. In previous studies, scholars used the feature vector cascade method when fusing multimodal data at each time step in the middle layer. This method puts each modal information in the same position and does not distinguish between strong modal information and weak modal information among multiple modalities. At the same time, this method does not pay attention to the embedding characteristics of multimodal signals across the time dimension. In response to the above problems, this paper proposes a new method and model for processing multimodal signals, which takes into account the delay and hysteresis characteristics of multimodal signals across the time dimension. The purpose is to obtain a multimodal fusion feature emotion analysis representation. We evaluate our method on the multimodal sentiment analysis benchmark dataset CMU Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity Corpus (CMU-MOSEI). We compare our proposed method with the state-of-the-art model and show excellent results.

Implicit emotions are often expressed through implicit and weak clues between modalities due to the lack of explicit emotional feature words, representing a significant challenge for multimodal sentiment analysis. In order to improve implicit emotion recognition, this paper proposes a multimodal sentiment analysis method that integrates KAN and the modal dynamic fusion mechanism. This method first introduces the KAN structure to construct a modal feature encoder to enhance the emotional expression ability of features. Then, the emotional contribution weight of each modality is calculated using the difference between the unimodal and multimodal sentiment scores, and the cross-attention mechanism guided by the main modality is used for feature fusion. Experiments on four datasets, CH-SIMS, CH-SIMSv2, MOSI, and MOSEI, show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the mainstream model in multiple indicators, especially when dealing with samples with implicit or ambiguous emotional expressions. The results verify the effectiveness of enhancing feature encoding capabilities and utilizing modal asymmetry information in implicit sentiment analysis.

The Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) 2024 addresses two contemporary multimodal affect and sentiment analysis problems: In the Social Perception Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Perception), participants will predict 16 different social attributes of individuals such as assertiveness, dominance, likability, and sincerity based on the provided audio-visual data. The Cross-Cultural Humor Detection Sub-Challenge (MuSe-Humor) dataset expands upon the Passau Spontaneous Football Coach Humor (Passau-SFCH) dataset, focusing on the detection of spontaneous humor in a cross-lingual and cross-cultural setting. The main objective of MuSe 2024 is to unite a broad audience from various research domains, including multimodal sentiment analysis, audio-visual affective computing, continuous signal processing, and natural language processing. By fostering collaboration and exchange among experts in these fields, the MuSe 2024 endeavors to advance the understanding and application of sentiment analysis and affective computing across multiple modalities. This baseline paper provides details on each sub-challenge and its corresponding dataset, extracted features from each data modality, and discusses challenge baselines. For our baseline system, we make use of a range of Transformers and expert-designed features and train Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models on them, resulting in a competitive baseline system. On the unseen test datasets of the respective sub-challenges, it achieves a mean Pearson's Correlation Coefficient (ρ) of 0.3573 for MuSe-Perception and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) value of 0.8682 for MuSe-Humor.

Human Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) is an attractive research that studies sentiment expressed from multiple heterogeneous modalities. While transformer-based methods have achieved great success, designing an effective “co-attention” model to associate text modality with nonverbal modalities remains challenging. There are two main problems: 1) the dominant role of the text in modalities is underutilization, and 2) the interaction between modalities is not sufficiently explored. This paper proposes a deep modular Co-Attention Shifting Network (CoASN) for MSA. A Cross-modal Modulation Module based on Co-attention (CMMC) and an Advanced Modality-mixing Adaptation Gate (AMAG) are constructed. The CMMC consists of the Text-guided Co-Attention (TCA) and Interior Transformer Encoder (ITE) units to capture inter-modal features and intra-modal features. With text modality as the core, the CMMC module aims to guide and promote the expression of emotion in nonverbal modalities, and the nonverbal modalities increase the richness of the text-based multimodal sentiment information. In addition, the AMAG module is introduced to explore the dynamical correlations among all modalities. Particularly, this efficient module first captures the nonverbal shifted representations and then combines them to calculate the shifted word embedding representations for the final MSA tasks. Extensive experiments on two commonly used datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate that our proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art performance.

Multimodal sentiment analysis has gained popularity as a research field for its ability to predict users’ emotional tendencies more comprehensively. The data fusion module is a critical component of multimodal sentiment analysis, as it allows for integrating information from multiple modalities. However, it is challenging to combine modalities and remove redundant information effectively. In our research, we address these challenges by proposing a multimodal sentiment analysis model based on supervised contrastive learning, which leads to more effective data representation and richer multimodal features. Specifically, we introduce the MLFC module, which utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer to solve the redundancy problem of each modal feature and reduce irrelevant information. Moreover, our model employs supervised contrastive learning to enhance its ability to learn standard sentiment features from data. We evaluate our model on three widely-used datasets, namely MVSA-single, MVSA-multiple, and HFM, demonstrating that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model. Finally, we conduct ablation experiments to validate the efficacy of our proposed method.

With the rapid development of social networks, more and more people express their emotions and opinions via online videos. However, most of the current research on multimodal sentiment analysis cannot do well with effective emotional fusion in multimodal data. To deal with the problem, we propose a multi-tensor fusion network with cross-modal modeling for multimodal sentiment analysis. In this study, the multimodal feature extraction with cross-modal modeling is utilized to obtain the relationship of emotional information between multiple modalities. Moreover, the multi-tensor fusion network is used to model the interaction of multiple pairs of bimodal and realize the emotional prediction of multimodal features. The proposed approach performs well in regression and different dimensions of classification experiments on the two public datasets CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI.

Multimodal sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention and lots of models have been proposed. However, the performance of the state-of-the-art models decreases sharply when they are deployed in the real world. We find that the main reason is that real-world applications can only access the text outputs by the automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, which may be with errors because of the limitation of model capacity. Through further analysis of the ASR outputs, we find that in some cases the sentiment words, the key sentiment elements in the textual modality, are recognized as other words, which makes the sentiment of the text change and hurts the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis models directly. To address this problem, we propose the sentiment word aware multimodal refinement model (SWRM), which can dynamically refine the erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues. Specifically, we first use the sentiment word position detection module to obtain the most possible position of the sentiment word in the text and then utilize the multimodal sentiment word refinement module to dynamically refine the sentiment word embeddings. The refined embeddings are taken as the textual inputs of the multimodal feature fusion module to predict the sentiment labels. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world datasets including MOSI-Speechbrain, MOSI-IBM, and MOSI-iFlytek and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, which surpasses the current state-of-the-art models on three datasets. Furthermore, our approach can be adapted for other multimodal feature fusion models easily 1 .

Inferring Sentiments from Supervised Classification of Text and Speech cues using Fuzzy Rules

Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention in recent years. Although the conversation in its natural form is usually multimodal, there still lacks work on multimodal machine translation in conversations. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Chat Translation (MCT), aiming to generate more accurate translations with the help of the associated dialogue history and visual context. To this end, we firstly construct a Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (MSCTD) containing 142,871 English-Chinese utterance pairs in 14,762 bilingual dialogues and 30,370 English-German utterance pairs in 3,079 bilingual dialogues. Each utterance pair, corresponding to the visual context that reflects the current conversational scene, is annotated with a sentiment label. Then, we benchmark the task by establishing multiple baseline systems that incorporate multimodal and sentiment features for MCT. Preliminary experiments on four language directions (English-Chinese and English-German) verify the potential of contextual and multimodal information fusion and the positive impact of sentiment on the MCT task. Additionally, as a by-product of the MSCTD, it also provides two new benchmarks on multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis. Our work can facilitate research on both multimodal chat translation and multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis.

Multimodal sentiment analysis is an extended approach to traditional language-based sentiment analysis, which uses other relevant modality data. Multimodal sentiment analysis usually applies visual, textual, and acoustic representations for sentiment prediction. Recently, various data fusion methodologies have been proposed for multimodal sentiment analysis. In most cases, textual modality plays a major role, and visual and acoustic modalities are used as auxiliary sources for multimodal sentiment analysis. However, in general multimedia such as video, text transcripts of an individual's speech are not provided. Research on an audio-visual sentiment analysis methodology that does not depend on text modality is essential for multimodal sentiment analysis in real-world industrial applications. Therefore, it is important to improve audio-visual sentiment analysis because it currently exhibits lower performance than multimodal sentiment analysis, including text modality. In this paper, we propose heterogeneous modality transfer learning (HMTL) to utilize the knowledge of aligned text data as a source modality in transfer learning to improve audio-visual sentiment analysis performance. Our approach uses a decoder and adversarial learning techniques to reduce the gap between the source and target modalities in the embedded space for multimodal representation. Our proposed methodology experimentally outperformed recent unimodal and bimodal audio-visual sentiment analysis achievements.

Multi-modal sentiment analysis extends conventional text-based definition of sentiment analysis to a multi-modal setup where multiple relevant modalities are leveraged to perform sentiment analysis. In real applications, however, acquiring annotated multi-modal data is normally labor expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we aim to reduce the annotation effort for multi-modal sentiment classification via semi-supervised learning. The key idea is to leverage the semi-supervised variational autoencoders to mine more information from unlabeled data for multi-modal sentiment analysis. Specifically, the mined information includes both the independent knowledge within single modality and the interactive knowledge among different modalities. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the great effectiveness of the proposed semi-supervised approach to multi-modal sentiment classification.

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to harvest people’s opinions or attitudes from multimedia data through fusion techniques. However, existing fusion methods cannot take advantage of the correlation between multimodal data but introduce interference factors. In this paper, we propose an Interactive Transformer and Soft Mapping based method for multimodal sentiment analysis. In the Interactive Transformer layer, an Interactive Multihead Guided-Attention structure composed of a pair of Multihead Attention modules is first utilized to find the mapping relationship between multimodalities. Then, the obtained results are fed into a Feedforward Neural Network. The Soft Mapping layer consisting of stacking Soft Attention module is finally used to map the results to a higher dimension to realize the fusion of multimodal information. The proposed model can fully consider the relationship between multiple modal pieces of information and provides a new solution to the problem of data interaction in multimodal sentiment analysis. Our model was evaluated on benchmark datasets CMU-MOSEI and MELD, and the accuracy is improved by 5.57% compared with the baseline standard.

Integrating color cues to improve multimodal sentiment analysis in social media

Multimodal sentiment analysis is critical in many real-world applications like smart cities, healthcare, and human-computer interaction, where sentiment is conveyed through various modalities, including text, audio, and video. However, existing methods still face several critical challenges in mitigating the impact of random modality loss, particularly in preserving the reliability of emotional patterns. To address these limitations, we introduce UniMSA, a novel framework for multimodal sentiment analysis with missing modalities. It addresses the missing data issue by improving the bipolar emotional uncertainty learning. Our approach enhances the reliability of sentiment analysis by integrating both positive and negative emotional uncertainty estimations to recover emotional patterns in randomly missing modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale multimodal sentiment datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UniMSA in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.