Ke Wu

Feng Li, Ke Wu, Yongwei Li

Multimodal emotion recognition plays a key role in many domains, including mental health monitoring, educational interaction, and human-computer interaction. However, existing methods often face three major challenges: unbalanced category distribution, the complexity of dynamic facial action unit time modeling, and the difficulty of feature fusion due to modal heterogeneity. With the explosive growth of multimodal data in social media scenarios, the need for building an efficient cross-modal fusion framework for emotion recognition is becoming increasingly urgent. To this end, this paper proposes Multimodal Cross-Attention Network and Contrastive Learning (MCN-CL) for multimodal emotion recognition. It uses a triple query mechanism and hard negative mining strategy to remove feature redundancy while preserving important emotional cues, effectively addressing the issues of modal heterogeneity and category imbalance. Experiment results on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, with Weighted F1 scores improving by 3.42% and 5.73%, respectively.

Ke Wu, Kyle Gorman, Richard Sproat

In speech-applications such as text-to-speech (TTS) or automatic speech recognition (ASR), \emph{text normalization} refers to the task of converting from a \emph{written} representation into a representation of how the text is to be \emph{spoken}. In all real-world speech applications, the text normalization engine is developed---in large part---by hand. For example, a hand-built grammar may be used to enumerate the possible ways of saying a given token in a given language, and a statistical model used to select the most appropriate pronunciation in context. In this study we examine the tradeoffs associated with using more or less language-specific domain knowledge in a text normalization engine. In the most data-rich scenario, we have access to a carefully constructed hand-built normalization grammar that for any given token will produce a set of all possible verbalizations for that token. We also assume a corpus of aligned written-spoken utterances, from which we can train a ranking model that selects the appropriate verbalization for the given context. As a substitute for the carefully constructed grammar, we also consider a scenario with a language-universal normalization \emph{covering grammar}, where the developer merely needs to provide a set of lexical items particular to the language. As a substitute for the aligned corpus, we also consider a scenario where one only has the spoken side, and the corresponding written side is "hallucinated" by composing the spoken side with the inverted normalization grammar. We investigate the accuracy of a text normalization engine under each of these scenarios. We report the results of experiments on English and Russian.