Multimodal emotion recognition based on audio and text by using hybrid attention networks

Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) has recently become a popular and challenging topic. The most key challenge in MER is how to effectively fuse multimodal information. Most of prior works may not fully consider the inter-modal and intra-modal attention mechanism to jointly learn intra-modal and inter-modal emotional salient information for further improving the performance of MER. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new MER framework based on audio and text by using Hybrid Attention Networks (MER-HAN). The proposed MER-HAN combines three different attention mechanisms such as the local intra-modal attention, the cross-modal attention, and the global inter-modal attention to effectively learn intra-modal and inter-modal emotional salient features for MER. Specifically, an Audio and Text Encoder (ATE) block equipped with deep learning techniques with the local intra-modal attention mechanism is initially designed to learn high-level audio and text feature representations from the corresponding audio and text sequences, respectively. Then, a Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) block is presented to jointly capture high-level shared feature representations across audio and text modalities. Finally, a Multimodal Emotion Classification (MEC) block with the global inter-modal attention mechanism is provided to obtain final MER results. Extensive experiments conducted on two public multimodal emotional datasets, i.e., IEMOCAP and MELD datasets, show the advantage of the proposed MER-HAN on MER tasks.