Optimizing Emotional Insight through Unimodal and Multimodal Long Short-term Memory Models

Abstract

The field of multimodal emotion recognition is increasingly gaining popularity as a research area. It involves analyzing human emotions across multiple modalities, such as acoustic, visual, and language. Emotion recognition is more effective as a multimodal learning task than relying on a single modality. In this paper, we present an unimodal and multimodal long short-term memory model with a class weight parameter technique for emotion recognition on the CMU-Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity dataset. In addition, a critical challenge lies in selecting the most effective fusion method for integrating multiple modalities. To address this, we applied four different fusion techniques: Early fusion, late fusion, deep fusion, and tensor fusion. These fusion methods improved the performance of multimodal emotion recognition compared to unimodal approaches. With the highly imbalanced number of samples per emotion class in the MOSEI dataset, adding a class weight parameter technique leads our model to outperform the state of the art on all three modalities — acoustic, visual, and language — as well as on all the fusion models. The challenges of class imbalance, which can lead to biased model performance, and using an effective fusion method for integrating multiple modalities often result in decreased accuracy in recognizing less frequent emotion classes. Our proposed model shows 2–3% performance improvement in the unimodal and 2% in the multimodal over the state-of-the-art achieved results.