# Multimodal Affective Analysis Using Hierarchical Attention Strategy with Word-Level Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

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- [Towards Interpretability in Audio and Visual Affective Machine Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08933/) (2023)
- [DeepMLF: Multimodal language model with learnable tokens for deep fusion in sentiment analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11082/) (2025)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal affective computing, learning to recognize and interpret human affects and subjective information from multiple data sources, is still challenging because: (i) it is hard to extract informative features to represent human affects from heterogeneous inputs; (ii) current fusion strategies only fuse different modalities at abstract level, ignoring time-dependent interactions between modalities. Addressing such issues, we introduce a hierarchical multimodal architecture with attention and word-level fusion to classify utter-ance-level sentiment and emotion from text and audio data. Our introduced model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on published datasets and we demonstrated that our model is able to visualize and interpret the synchronized attention over modalities.
