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Academic Journal of Computing & Information Science, 2025, 8(1); doi: 10.25236/AJCIS.2025.080104.

Multimodal conversational emotion recognition based on hier-archical Transformer

Author(s)

Bai Yimin1, Zhang Pengwei1, Zhang Jingze2, Chen Jingxia1

Corresponding Author:
Chen Jingxia
Affiliation(s)

1Shaanxi University of Science & Technology, Xi'an, China

2Xi’an Gaoxin No.1 Experimental High School, Xi'an, China

Abstract

Addressing the issues of limited single-modality feature representation, inadequate multimodal feature fusion, and the difficulty of modeling conversation scenarios in multimodal conversational emotion recognition tasks, a Hierarchical Transformer-based multimodal conversational emotion recognition model has been proposed. The model employs self-attention bidirectional gated recurrent units to delve into the contextual dependencies of single-modality features such as text, video, and audio, thereby enhancing the representational power of features. Through hierarchical gated multi-head attention, it learns complementary information among modalities and adaptively learns the weights of each modality, reducing the noise interference of redundant information on multimodal features. The hierarchical Transformer is used to model conversation scenarios, utilizing a masking mechanism to simulate dependencies within contextual language, within speakers, and between speakers, gaining a deeper understanding of the emotional states of speakers in conversations. On the IEMOCAP and MELD benchmark datasets, the model achieved accuracy and F1 scores of 71.10% and 70.97% on IEMOCAP, and 67.16% and 66.11% on MELD, respectively, outperforming similar methods in terms of accuracy.

Keywords

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC), Multimodality, Transformer, Gated Fusion, Multi-Head Attention

Cite This Paper

Bai Yimin, Zhang Pengwei, Zhang Jingze, Chen Jingxia. Multimodal conversational emotion recognition based on hier-archical Transformer. Academic Journal of Computing & Information Science (2025), Vol. 8, Issue 1: 19-31. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJCIS.2025.080104.

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