Deep Modular Co-Attention Shifting Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

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.