Video sentiment analysis as a decision-making process is inherently complex, involving the fusion of decisions from multiple modalities and the so-caused cognitive biases. Inspired by recent advances in quantum cognition, we show that the sentiment judgment from one modality could be incompatible with the judgment from another, i.e., the order matters and they cannot be jointly measured to produce a final decision. Thus the cognitive process exhibits ``quantum-like'' biases that cannot be captured by classical probability theories. Accordingly, we propose a fundamentally new, quantum cognitively motivated fusion strategy for predicting sentiment judgments. In particular, we formulate utterances as quantum superposition states of positive and negative sentiment judgments, and uni-modal classifiers as mutually incompatible observables, on a complex-valued Hilbert space with positive-operator valued measures. Experiments on two benchmarking datasets illustrate that our model significantly outperforms various existing decision level and a range of state-of-the-art content-level fusion approaches. The results also show that the concept of incompatibility allows effective handling of all combination patterns, including those extreme cases that are wrongly predicted by all uni-modal classifiers.
Video sentiment analysis as a decision-making process is inherently complex, involving the fusion of decisions from multiple modalities and the so-caused cognitive biases. Inspired by recent advances in quantum cognition, we show that the sentiment judgment from one modality could be incompatible with the judgment from another, i.e., the order matters and they cannot be jointly measured to produce a final decision. Thus the cognitive process exhibits ``quantum-like'' biases that cannot be captured by classical probability theories. Accordingly, we propose a fundamentally new, quantum cognitively motivated fusion strategy for predicting sentiment judgments. In particular, we formulate utterances as quantum superposition states of positive and negative sentiment judgments, and uni-modal classifiers as mutually incompatible observables, on a complex-valued Hilbert space with positive-operator valued measures. Experiments on two benchmarking datasets illustrate that our model significantly outperforms various existing decision level and a range of state-of-the-art content-level fusion approaches. The results also show that the concept of incompatibility allows effective handling of all combination patterns, including those extreme cases that are wrongly predicted by all uni-modal classifiers.
A long-standing goal in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to develop systems that can perceive and understand human multimodal language. This requires both the consideration of context in the form of surrounding utterances in a conversation, i.e., context modelling, as well as the impact of different modalities (e.g., linguistic, visual acoustic), i.e., multimodal fusion. In the last few years, significant strides have been made towards the interpretation of human language due to simultaneous advancement in deep learning, data gathering and computing infrastructure. AI models have been investigated to either model interactions across distinct modalities, i.e., linguistic, visual and acoustic, or model interactions across parties in a conversation, achieving unprecedented levels of performance. However, AI models are often designed with only performance as their design target, leaving aside other essential factors such as transparency, interpretability, and how humans understand and reason about cognitive states. In line with this observation, in this dissertation, we develop quantum probabilistic neural models and techniques that allow us to capture rational and irrational cognitive biases, without requiring a priori understanding and identification of them. First, we present a comprehensive empirical comparison of state-of-the-art (SOTA) modality fusion strategies for video sentiment analysis. The findings provide us helpful insights into the development of more effective modality fusion models incorporating quantum-inspired components. Second, we introduce an end-to-end complex-valued neural model for video sentiment analysis, simulating quantum procedural steps, outside of physics, into the neural network modelling paradigm. Third, we investigate non-classical correlations across different modalities. In particular, we describe a methodology to model interactions between image and text for an information retrieval scenario. The results provide us with theoretical and empirical insights to develop a transparent end-to-end probabilistic neural model for video emotion detection in conversations, capturing non-classical correlations across distinct modalities. Fourth, we introduce a theoretical framework to model user's cognitive states underlying their multimodal decision perspectives, and propose a methodology to capture interference of modalities in decision making. Overall, we show that our models advance the SOTA on various affective analysis tasks, achieve high transparency due to the mapping to quantum physics meanings, and improve post-hoc interpretability, unearthing useful and explainable knowledge about cross-modal interactions.
Video data is multimodal in its nature, where an utterance can involve linguistic, visual and acoustic information. Therefore, a key challenge for video sentiment analysis is how to combine different modalities for sentiment recognition effectively. The latest neural network approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance, but they neglect to a large degree of how humans understand and reason about sentiment states. By contrast, recent advances in quantum probabilistic neural models have achieved comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, yet with better transparency and increased level of interpretability. However, the existing quantum-inspired models treat quantum states as either a classical mixture or as a separable tensor product across modalities, without triggering their interactions in a way that they are correlated or non-separable (i.e., entangled). This means that the current models have not fully exploited the expressive power of quantum probabilities. To fill this gap, we propose a transparent quantum probabilistic neural model. The model induces different modalities to interact in such a way that they may not be separable, encoding crossmodal information in the form of non-classical correlations. Comprehensive evaluation on two benchmarking datasets for video sentiment analysis shows that the model achieves significant performance improvement. We also show that the degree of non-separability between modalities optimizes the post-hoc interpretability.
Sarcasm and sentiment embody intrinsic uncertainty of human cognition, making joint detection of multi-modal sarcasm and sentiment a challenging task.In view of the advantages of quantum probability (QP) in modeling such uncertainty, this paper explores the potential of QP as a mathematical framework and proposes a QP driven multi-task (QPM) learning framework.The QPM framework involves a complex-valued multi-modal representation encoder, a quantum-like fusion network and a quantum measurement mechanism.Each multimodal (e.g., textual, visual) utterance is first encoded as a quantum superposition of a set of basis terms using a complex-valued representation.Then, the quantum-like fusion network leverages quantum state composition and quantum interference to model the contextual interaction between adjacent utterances and the correlations across modalities respectively.Finally, quantum incompatible measurements are performed on the multi-modal representation of each utterance to yield the probabilistic outcomes of sarcasm and sentiment recognition.Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our model.
Sarcasm, sentiment, and emotion are three typical kinds of spontaneous affective responses of humans to external events and they are tightly intertwined with each other. Such events may be expressed in multiple modalities (e.g., linguistic, visual and acoustic), e.g., multi-modal conversations. Joint analysis of humans’ multi-modal sarcasm, sentiment, and emotion is an important yet challenging topic, as it is a complex cognitive process involving both cross-modality interaction and cross-affection correlation. From the probability theory perspective, cross-affection correlation also means that the judgments on sarcasm, sentiment, and emotion are incompatible. However, this exposed phenomenon cannot be sufficiently modelled by classical probability theory due to its assumption of compatibility. Neither do the existing approaches take it into consideration. In view of the recent success of quantum probability (QP) in modeling human cognition, particularly contextual incompatible decision making, we take the first step towards introducing QP into joint multi-modal sarcasm, sentiment, and emotion analysis. Specifically, we propose aQUantum probabIlity driven multi-modal sarcasm, sEntiment and emoTion analysis framework, termed QUIET. Extensive experiments on two datasets and the results show that the effectiveness and advantages of QUIET in comparison with a wide range of the state-of-the-art baselines. We also show the great potential of QP in multi-affect analysis.
Quantum theory, originally proposed as a physical theory to describe the motions of microscopic particles, has been applied to various non-physics domains involving human cognition and decision-making that are inherently uncertain and exhibit certain non-classical, quantum-like characteristics. Sentiment analysis is a typical example of such domains. In the last few years, by leveraging the modeling power of quantum probability (a non-classical probability stemming from quantum mechanics methodology) and deep neural networks, a range of novel quantum-cognitively inspired models for sentiment analysis have emerged and performed well. This survey presents a timely overview of the latest developments in this fascinating cross-disciplinary area. We first provide a background of quantum probability and quantum cognition at a theoretical level, analyzing their advantages over classical theories in modeling the cognitive aspects of sentiment analysis. Then, recent quantum-cognitively inspired models are introduced and discussed in detail, focusing on how they approach the key challenges of the sentiment analysis task. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current research and highlight future research directions.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has gained significant popularity in recent years, which emphasizes the aspect-level sentiment representation of sentences. Current methods for ABSA often use pre-trained models and graph convolution to represent word dependencies. However, they struggle with long-range dependency issues in lengthy texts, resulting in averaging and loss of contextual semantic information. In this paper, we explore how richer semantic relationships can be encoded more efficiently. Inspired by quantum theory, we construct superposition states from text sequences and utilize them with quantum measurements to explicitly capture complex semantic relationships within word sequences. Specifically, we propose an attention-based semantic dependency fusion method for ABSA, which employs a quantum embedding module to create a superposition state of real-valued word sequence features in a complex-valued Hilbert space. This approach yields a word sequence density matrix representation that enhances the handling of long-range dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce a quantum cross-attention mechanism to integrate sequence features with dependency relationships between specific word pairs, aiming to capture the associations between particular aspects and comments more comprehensively. Our experiments on the SemEval-2014 and Twitter datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the quantum-inspired attention-based semantic dependency fusion model for the ABSA task.