# TCAN: Text-oriented Cross Attention Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04545/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [Tensor Fusion Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07250/) (2017)
- [Efficient Low-rank Multimodal Fusion with Modality-Specific Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00064/) (2018)
- [MISA: Modality-Invariant and -Specific Representations for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03545/) (2020)
- [MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis in Online Opinion Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06259/) (2016)
- [Learning Modality-Specific Representations with Self-Supervised Multi-Task Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04830/) (2021)
- [Learning Factorized Multimodal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06176/) (2018)
- [Memory Fusion Network for Multi-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00927/) (2018)
- [Words Can Shift: Dynamically Adjusting Word Representations Using Nonverbal Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09362/) (2018)
- [Learning Relationships between Text, Audio, and Video via Deep Canonical Correlation for Multimodal Language Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05544/) (2019)
- [Decoupled Multimodal Distilling for Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13802/) (2023)
- [M3ER: Multiplicative Multimodal Emotion Recognition Using Facial, Textual, and Speech Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05659/) (2019)
- [Bi-Bimodal Modality Fusion for Correlation-Controlled Multimodal Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13669/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Word-Level Fusion and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00924/) (2018)
- [Context De-confounded Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11921/) (2023)
- [Improving Zero-shot Translation with Language-Independent Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08584/) (2019)
- [Text-oriented Modality Reinforcement Network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis from Unaligned Multimodal Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13205/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis using Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08696/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) endeavors to understand human sentiment by leveraging language, visual, and acoustic modalities. Despite the remarkable performance exhibited by previous MSA approaches, the presence of inherent multimodal heterogeneities poses a challenge, with the contribution of different modalities varying considerably. Past research predominantly focused on improving representation learning techniques and feature fusion strategies. However, many of these efforts overlooked the variation in semantic richness among different modalities, treating each modality uniformly. This approach may lead to underestimating the significance of strong modalities while overemphasizing the importance of weak ones. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a Text-oriented Cross-Attention Network (TCAN), emphasizing the predominant role of the text modality in MSA. Specifically, for each multimodal sample, by taking unaligned sequences of the three modalities as inputs, we initially allocate the extracted unimodal features into a visual-text and an acoustic-text pair. Subsequently, we implement self-attention on the text modality and apply text-queried cross-attention to the visual and acoustic modalities. To mitigate the influence of noise signals and redundant features, we incorporate a gated control mechanism into the framework. Additionally, we introduce unimodal joint learning to gain a deeper understanding of homogeneous emotional tendencies across diverse modalities through backpropagation. Experimental results demonstrate that TCAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MSA methods on two datasets (CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI).