HiMul-LGG: A hierarchical decision fusion-based local-global graph neural network for multimodal emotion recognition in conversation.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a vital task that requires deciphering human emotions through analysis of contextual and multimodal information. However, extant research on ERC concentrates predominantly on investigating multimodal fusion while overlooking the model's constraints in dealing with unimodal representation discrepancy and speaker dependencies. To address the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a Hierarchical decision fusion-based Local-Global Graph Neural Network for multimodal ERC (HiMul-LGG). HiMul-LGG employs a hierarchical decision fusion strategy to ensure feature alignment across modalities. Moreover, HiMul-LGG also adopts a local-global graph neural network architecture to reinforce inter-modality and intra-modality speaker dependency. Additionally, HiMul-LGG utilizes a cross-modal multi-head attention mechanism to promote interplay between modalities. We evaluate HiMul-LGG on two emotion recognition datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, where HiMul-LGG outperforms existing methods. The results of the ablation study also imply the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical decision fusion strategy and local-global structure of Graph construction.

Authors

  • Changzeng Fu
    Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka 560-8531, Japan.
  • Fengkui Qian
    Northeastern University, China. Electronic address: 2372410@stu.neu.edu.cn.
  • Kaifeng Su
    Northeastern University, China. Electronic address: 2372306@stu.neu.edu.cn.
  • Yikai Su
    Northeastern University, China. Electronic address: 2372307@stu.neu.edu.cn.
  • Ze Wang
    School of Traditional Chinese Materia Medica, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 312 Anshanwest Road, Nankai District, Tianjin 300193, China.
  • Jiaqi Shi
    College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China.
  • Zhigang Liu
    Cardiac Surgery, TEDA International Cardiovascular Hospital, Tianjin, China.
  • Chaoran Liu
    School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China; Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beijing, China.
  • Carlos Toshinori Ishi
    RIKEN, Japan. Electronic address: carlos.ishi@riken.jp.