CorMulT: A Semi-Supervised Modality Correlation-Aware Multimodal Transformer for Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis is an active research area that combines multiple data modalities, e.g., text, image and audio, to analyze human emotions, and benefits a variety of applications. Existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods can be roughly classified as modality interaction-based methods, modality transformation-based methods and modality similarity-based methods. However, most of these methods highly rely on the strong correlations between modalities, and cannot fully uncover and utilize the correlations between modalities to enhance sentiment analysis. Therefore, these methods usually achieve unsatisfactory performance for identifying the sentiment of multimodal data with weak correlations. To address this issue, we proposed a two-stage semi-supervised model termed Correlation-aware Multimodal Transformer (CorMulT) which consists of pre-training stage and prediction stage. At the pre-training stage, a modality correlation contrastive learning module is designed to efficiently learn modality correlation coefficients between different modalities. At the prediction stage, the learned correlation coefficients are fused with modality representations to make the sentiment prediction. According to the experiments on the popular multimodal dataset CMU-MOSEI, CorMulT obviously surpasses the state-of-the-art multimodal sentiment analysis methods.