CTFN: Hierarchical Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using Coupled-Translation Fusion Network

Jiajia Tang, Kang Li, Xuanyu Jin, Andrzej Cichocki, Qibin Zhao, Wanzeng Kong


Abstract
Multimodal sentiment analysis is the challenging research area that attends to the fusion of multiple heterogeneous modalities. The main challenge is the occurrence of some missing modalities during the multimodal fusion procedure. However, the existing techniques require all modalities as input, thus are sensitive to missing modalities at predicting time. In this work, the coupled-translation fusion network (CTFN) is firstly proposed to model bi-direction interplay via couple learning, ensuring the robustness in respect to missing modalities. Specifically, the cyclic consistency constraint is presented to improve the translation performance, allowing us directly to discard decoder and only embraces encoder of Transformer. This could contribute to a much lighter model. Due to the couple learning, CTFN is able to conduct bi-direction cross-modality intercorrelation parallelly. Based on CTFN, a hierarchical architecture is further established to exploit multiple bi-direction translations, leading to double multimodal fusing embeddings compared with traditional translation methods. Moreover, the convolution block is utilized to further highlight explicit interactions among those translations. For evaluation, CTFN was verified on two multimodal benchmarks with extensive ablation studies. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or often competitive performance. Additionally, CTFN still maintains robustness when considering missing modality.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.412
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5301–5311
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.412
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.412
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiajia Tang, Kang Li, Xuanyu Jin, Andrzej Cichocki, Qibin Zhao, and Wanzeng Kong. 2021. CTFN: Hierarchical Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using Coupled-Translation Fusion Network. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5301–5311, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CTFN: Hierarchical Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using Coupled-Translation Fusion Network (Tang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.412.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-long.412.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.412.mp4
Data
MELD