Integrating Multimodal Information in Large Pretrained Transformers.

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.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MMSA) is a research method that extracts effective information from heterogeneous modal information. Then, MMSA processes the multimodal data and performs sentiment analysis. Along with big data and machine learning development, multimodal sentiment analysis has become a hot research direction in multimodal learning and natural language processing. Although various feature extraction methods and information fusion methods have been continuously proposed, challenges exist in MMSA research. First, in terms of feature extraction, pre-trained models trained with many data sets can obtain higher quality features, but research on how to use these feature extraction methods to extract the best features is still needed. Currently, the more popular feature fusion methods do not focus on the interaction between multiple modal information and the retention of basic information. To overcome these problems a multimodal sentiment analysis model utilizes text features as core modal features, using video and audio modal features as auxiliary modal features, multimodal feature modality attention mechanism to extract the intrinsic connection between different modalities. The attention mechanism uses the features of video modality and audio modality as the focus and then enhances the text modality with the fusion of video modality and modality. To improve the quality of extracted features, this method chooses the transfer learning training method and uses the pre-trained model for processing. This research uses the CMU-MOSI dataset to test the proposed method. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed model in emotion score prediction and emotion classification tasks exceeds traditional methods and baseline methods.

With the increasing popularity of video sharing websites such as YouTube and Facebook, multimodal sentiment analysis has received increasing attention from the scientific community. Contrary to previous works in multimodal sentiment analysis which focus on holistic information in speech segments such as bag of words representations and average facial expression intensity, we propose a novel deep architecture for multimodal sentiment analysis that is able to perform modality fusion at the word level. In this paper, we propose the Gated Multimodal Embedding LSTM with Temporal Attention (GME-LSTM(A)) model that is composed of 2 modules. The Gated Multimodal Embedding allows us to alleviate the difficulties of fusion when there are noisy modalities. The LSTM with Temporal Attention can perform word level fusion at a finer fusion resolution between the input modalities and attends to the most important time steps. As a result, the GME-LSTM(A) is able to better model the multimodal structure of speech through time and perform better sentiment comprehension. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on the publicly-available Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis (CMU-MOSI) dataset by achieving state-of-the-art sentiment classification and regression results. Qualitative analysis on our model emphasizes the importance of the Temporal Attention Layer in sentiment prediction because the additional acoustic and visual modalities are noisy. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the Gated Multimodal Embedding in selectively filtering these noisy modalities out. These results and analysis open new areas in the study of sentiment analysis in human communication and provide new models for multimodal fusion.

Integrating color cues to improve multimodal sentiment analysis in social media

Multimodal sentiment analysis refers to the use of computers to analyze and identify the emotions that people want to express through the extracted multimodal sentiment features, and it plays a significant role in human-computer interaction and financial market prediction. Most existing approaches to multimodal sentiment analysis use contextual information for modeling, and while this modeling approach can effectively capture the contextual connections within modalities, the correlations between modalities are often overlooked, and the correlations between modalities are also critical to the final recognition results in multimodal sentiment analysis. Therefore, this paper proposes a multimodal sentiment analysis approach based on the universal transformer, a framework that uses the universal transformer to model the connections between multiple modalities while employing effective feature extraction methods to capture the contextual connections of individual modalities. We evaluated our proposed method on two benchmark datasets for multimodal sentiment analysis, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, and the results outperformed other methods of the same type.

Multimodal sentiment analysis is an important research area that predicts speaker’s sentiment tendency through features extracted from textual, visual and acoustic modalities. The central challenge is the fusion method of the multimodal information. A variety of fusion methods have been proposed, but few of them adopt end-to-end translation models to mine the subtle correlation between modalities. Enlightened by recent success of Transformer in the area of machine translation, we propose a new fusion method, TransModality, to address the task of multimodal sentiment analysis. We assume that translation between modalities contributes to a better joint representation of speaker’s utterance. With Transformer, the learned features embody the information both from the source modality and the target modality. We validate our model on multiple multimodal datasets: CMU-MOSI, MELD, IEMOCAP. The experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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.

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to understand people’s attitudes and opinions from different data forms. Traditional modality fusion methods for multimodal sentiment analysis con-catenate or multiply various modalities without fully utilizing context information and the correlation between modalities. To solve this problem, this article provides a new model based on a multimodal sentiment analysis framework based on a recurrent neural network with a complex attention mechanism. First, after the raw data is preprocessed, the numerical feature representation is obtained using feature extraction. Next, the numerical features are input into the recurrent neural network, and the output results are multimodally fused using a complex attention mechanism layer. The objective of the complex attention mechanism is to leverage enhanced non-linearity to more effectively capture the inter-modal correlations, thereby improving the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis. Finally, the processed results are fed into the classification layer and the sentiment output is obtained using the classification layer. This process can effectively capture the semantic information and contextual relationship of the input sequence and fuse different pieces of modal information. Our model was tested on the CMU-MOSEI datasets, achieving an accuracy of 82.04%.

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

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.

Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) is an essential task in sentiment analysis that has garnered considerable attention in recent years. Typical approaches in MABSA often utilize cross-modal Transformers to capture interactions between textual and visual modalities. However, bridging the semantic gap between modalities spaces and addressing interference from irrelevant visual objects at different scales remains challenging. To tackle these limitations, we present the Multi-level Textual-Visual Alignment and Fusion Network (MTVAF) in this work, which incorporates three auxiliary tasks. Specifically, MTVAF first transforms multi-level image information into image descriptions, facial descriptions, and optical characters. These are then concatenated with the textual input to form a textual+visual input, facilitating comprehensive alignment between visual and textual modalities. Next, both inputs are fed into an integrated text model that incorporates relevant visual representations. Dynamic attention mechanisms are employed to generate visual prompts to control cross-modal fusion. Finally, we align the probability distributions of the textual input space and the textual+visual input space, effectively reducing noise introduced during the alignment process. Experimental results on two MABSA benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MTVAF, showcasing its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Our codes are available at https://github.com/MKMaS-GUET/MTVAF.

We present a case study as part of a work-in-progress project about multimodal sentiment analysis on historic German plays, taking Emilia Galotti by G. E. Lessing as our initial use case. We analyze the textual version and an audio version (audio book). We focus on ready-to-use sentiment analysis methods: For the textual component, we implement a naive lexicon-based approach and another approach that enhances the lexicon by means of several NLP methods. For the audio analysis, we use the free version of the Vokaturi tool. We compare the results of all approaches and evaluate them against the annotations of a human expert, which serves as a gold standard. For our use case, we can show that audio and text sentiment analysis behave very differently: textual sentiment analysis tends to predict sentiment as rather negative and audio sentiment as rather positive. Compared to the gold standard, the textual sentiment analysis achieves accuracies of 56% while the accuracy for audio sentiment analysis is only 32%. We discuss possible reasons for these mediocre results and give an outlook on further steps we want to pursue in the context of multimodal sentiment analysis on historic plays.

Korean is the native and official language spoken by Chinese-Korean people, and Weibo is a social media software with a huge number of users in China. Currently, there is few studies related to sentiment analysis of Korean-language Weibo texts posted by Chinese-Korean users. In this paper, we propose a sentiment classification method for Chinese-Korean Weibo based on pre-trained language model and transfer learning. Firstly, we crawled the Chinese-Korean Weibo data from Sina Weibo and label them with sentiment to get the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis (CKWSA) dataset. Secondly, to solve the problem of few training samples of the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis dataset, we fine-tune the classifier based on the pre-trained Korean language model on the Korean Twitter sentiment analysis dataset to obtain the Korean Twitter sentiment classification model; and further fine-tune the model on CKWSA dataset to get Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment classification model. The experiments show that the proposed classification method based on pre-trained language model and transfer learning has great performance, and there is an improvement compared other baselines on the Chinese-Korean Weibo sentiment analysis dataset.

More recently, as images, memes and graphics interchange formats have dominated social feeds, typographic/infographic visual content has emerged as an important social media component. This multimodal text combines text and image, defining a novel visual language that must be analysed because it has the potential to modify, confirm or grade the sentiment's polarity. The problem is how to effectively use information from the visual and textual content in image‐text posts. This article presents a new deep learning‐based multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) model using multimodal data such as images, text and multimodal text (image with embedded text). The text analytic unit, the discretization control unit, the picture analytic component and the decision‐making component are all included in this system. The discretization unit separates the text from the picture using the variant and channel augmented maximally stable extremal regions (VCA‐MSERs) technique, which are then analysed as discrete elements and fed into the appropriate image and text analytics units. The text analytics system utilizes a stacked recurrent neural network with multilevel attention and feedback module (SRNN‐MAFM) to detect the sentiment of the text. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) structure with parallel‐dilated convolution and self‐attention module (PDC‐SAM) is developed to forecast the emotional response to visual content. Finally, the decision component employs a Boolean framework including an OR function to evaluate and classify the output into three fine‐grained sentiment classes: positive, neutral and negative. The proposed work is simulated in the python platform using the STS‐Gold, Flickr 8k and B‐T4SA datasets for sentiment analysis of text and visual and multimodal text. Simulation outcomes proved that the suggested method achieved better accuracy of 97.8%, 97.7% and 90% for text, visual and MSA individually compared to other methods.