TPFN: A Text-Guided Progressive Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

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 wide application of smart devices enables the availability of multimodal data, which can be utilized in many tasks. In the field of multimodal sentiment analysis, most previous works focus on exploring intra- and inter-modal interactions. However, training a network with cross-modal information (language, audio and visual) is still challenging due to the modality gap. Besides, while learning dynamics within each sample draws great attention, the learning of inter-sample and inter-class relationships is neglected. Moreover, the size of datasets limits the generalization ability of the models. To address the afore-mentioned issues, we propose a novel framework HyCon for hybrid contrastive learning of tri-modal representation. Specifically, we simultaneously perform intra-/inter-modal contrastive learning and semi-contrastive learning, with which the model can fully explore cross-modal interactions, learn inter-sample and inter-class relationships, and reduce the modality gap. Besides, refinement term and modality margin are introduced to enable a better learning of unimodal pairs. Moreover, we devise pair selection mechanism to identify and assign weights to the informative negative and positive pairs. HyCon can naturally generate many training pairs for better generalization and reduce the negative effect of limited datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines on multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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 .

Sentiment-aware multimodal pre-training for multimodal sentiment analysis

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.

Cross-modal fine-grained alignment and fusion network for multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis

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.

TCMT: Target-oriented Cross Modal Transformer for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis faces a number of challenges, including modality missing, modality heterogeneity gap, incomplete datasets, etc. Previous studies usually adopt schemes like meta-learning or multi-layer structures. Nevertheless, these methods lack interpretability for the interaction between modalities. In this paper, we constructed a new dataset, SM-MSD, for sentiment analysis in social media (SAS) that differs significantly from conventional corpora, comprising 10K instances of diverse data from Twitter, encompassing text, emoticons, emojis, and text embedded in images. This dataset aims to reflect authentic social scenarios and various emotional expressions, and provides a meaningful and challenging evaluation benchmark for multimodal sentiment analysis in specific contexts. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task framework based on heterogeneous graph neural networks (H-GNNs) and contrastive learning. For the first time, heterogeneous graph neural networks are applied to multimodal sentiment analysis tasks. In the case of additional labeling data, it guides the emotion prediction of the missing mode. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme surpasses state-of-the-art methods by 1.7% and 0 in accuracy and 1.54% and 4.9% in F1-score on the MOSI and MOSEI datasets, respectively, and exhibits robustness to modality missing scenarios.

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.