Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences

Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Shaojie Bai, Paul Pu Liang, J. Zico Kolter, Louis-Philippe Morency, Ruslan Salakhutdinov


Abstract
Human language is often multimodal, which comprehends a mixture of natural language, facial gestures, and acoustic behaviors. However, two major challenges in modeling such multimodal human language time-series data exist: 1) inherent data non-alignment due to variable sampling rates for the sequences from each modality; and 2) long-range dependencies between elements across modalities. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Transformer (MulT) to generically address the above issues in an end-to-end manner without explicitly aligning the data. At the heart of our model is the directional pairwise crossmodal attention, which attends to interactions between multimodal sequences across distinct time steps and latently adapt streams from one modality to another. Comprehensive experiments on both aligned and non-aligned multimodal time-series show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. In addition, empirical analysis suggests that correlated crossmodal signals are able to be captured by the proposed crossmodal attention mechanism in MulT.
Anthology ID:
P19-1656
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6558–6569
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1656
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1656
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Shaojie Bai, Paul Pu Liang, J. Zico Kolter, Louis-Philippe Morency, and Ruslan Salakhutdinov. 2019. Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6558–6569, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences (Tsai et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1656.pdf
Code
 yaohungt/Multimodal-Transformer +  additional community code
Data
CMU-MOSEIIEMOCAPMultimodal Opinionlevel Sentiment Intensity