Masked Graph Learning with Recurrent Alignment for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MGLRA, a novel multimodal emotion recognition method that uses recurrent alignment and masked graph convolution to improve feature fusion and recognition accuracy across multiple modalities.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new approach combining recurrent iterative alignment and masked GCN for better multimodal feature fusion in emotion recognition.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

Effectively aligns multimodal features using recurrent and attention mechanisms.

Reduces intra-modal noise and improves emotion recognition accuracy.

Abstract

Since Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) can be applied to public opinion monitoring, intelligent dialogue robots, and other fields, it has received extensive research attention in recent years. Unlike traditional unimodal emotion recognition, MERC can fuse complementary semantic information between multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and vision) to improve emotion recognition. However, previous work ignored the inter-modal alignment process and the intra-modal noise information before multimodal fusion but directly fuses multimodal features, which will hinder the model for representation learning. In this study, we have developed a novel approach called Masked Graph Learning with Recursive Alignment (MGLRA) to tackle this problem, which uses a recurrent iterative module with memory to align multimodal features, and then uses the masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion. First, we employ LSTM to capture contextual information and use a graph attention-filtering mechanism to eliminate noise effectively within the modality. Second, we build a recurrent iteration module with a memory function, which can use communication between different modalities to eliminate the gap between modalities and achieve the preliminary alignment of features between modalities. Then, a cross-modal multi-head attention mechanism is introduced to achieve feature alignment between modalities and construct a masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion, which can perform random mask reconstruction on the nodes in the graph to obtain better node feature representation. Finally, we utilize a multilayer perceptron (MLP) for emotion recognition. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., IEMOCAP and MELD) demonstrate that {MGLRA} outperforms state-of-the-art methods.