Using Large Pre-Trained Models with Cross-Modal Attention for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition

Recently, self-supervised pre-training has shown significant improvements in many areas of machine learning, including speech and NLP. We propose using large self-supervised pre-trained models for both audio and text modality with cross-modality attention for multimodal emotion recognition. We use Wav2Vec2.0 [1] as an audio encoder base for robust speech features extraction and the BERT model [2] as a text encoder base for better contextual representation of text. These high capacity models trained on large amounts of unlabeled data contain rich feature representations and improve the downstream task's performance. We use the cross-modal attention [3] mechanism to learn alignment between audio and text representations from self-supervised models. Cross-modal attention also helps in extracting interactive information between audio and text features. We obtain utterance-level feature representation from frame-level features using statistics pooling for both audio and text modality and combine them using the early fusion technique. Our experiments show that the proposed approach obtains a 1.88% absolute improvement in accuracy compared to the previous state-of-the-art method [3] on the IEMOCAP dataset [35]. We also conduct unimodal experiments for both audio and text modalities and compare them with previous best methods.