MTAG: Modal-Temporal Attention Graph for Unaligned Human Multimodal Language Sequences

Jianing Yang, Yongxin Wang, Ruitao Yi, Yuying Zhu, Azaan Rehman, Amir Zadeh, Soujanya Poria, Louis-Philippe Morency


Abstract
Human communication is multimodal in nature; it is through multiple modalities such as language, voice, and facial expressions, that opinions and emotions are expressed. Data in this domain exhibits complex multi-relational and temporal interactions. Learning from this data is a fundamentally challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose Modal-Temporal Attention Graph (MTAG). MTAG is an interpretable graph-based neural model that provides a suitable framework for analyzing multimodal sequential data. We first introduce a procedure to convert unaligned multimodal sequence data into a graph with heterogeneous nodes and edges that captures the rich interactions across modalities and through time. Then, a novel graph fusion operation, called MTAG fusion, along with a dynamic pruning and read-out technique, is designed to efficiently process this modal-temporal graph and capture various interactions. By learning to focus only on the important interactions within the graph, MTAG achieves state-of-the-art performance on multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition benchmarks, while utilizing significantly fewer model parameters.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.79
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1009–1021
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.79
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.79
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianing Yang, Yongxin Wang, Ruitao Yi, Yuying Zhu, Azaan Rehman, Amir Zadeh, Soujanya Poria, and Louis-Philippe Morency. 2021. MTAG: Modal-Temporal Attention Graph for Unaligned Human Multimodal Language Sequences. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1009–1021, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MTAG: Modal-Temporal Attention Graph for Unaligned Human Multimodal Language Sequences (Yang et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.79.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.79.mp4
Code
 jedyang97/MTAG
Data
IEMOCAP