  Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to extract and integrate semantic
information collected from multiple modalities to recognize the expressed
emotions and sentiment in multimodal data. This research area's major concern
lies in developing an extraordinary fusion scheme that can extract and
integrate key information from various modalities. However, one issue that may
restrict previous work to achieve a higher level is the lack of proper modeling
for the dynamics of the competition between the independence and relevance
among modalities, which could deteriorate fusion outcomes by causing the
collapse of modality-specific feature space or introducing extra noise. To
mitigate this, we propose the Bi-Bimodal Fusion Network (BBFN), a novel
end-to-end network that performs fusion (relevance increment) and separation
(difference increment) on pairwise modality representations. The two parts are
trained simultaneously such that the combat between them is simulated. The
model takes two bimodal pairs as input due to the known information imbalance
among modalities. In addition, we leverage a gated control mechanism in the
Transformer architecture to further improve the final output. Experimental
results on three datasets (CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and UR-FUNNY) verifies that our
model significantly outperforms the SOTA. The implementation of this work is
available at https://github.com/declare-lab/multimodal-deep-learning.

Artificial Intelligence