AVaTER: Fusing Audio, Visual, and Textual Modalities Using Cross-Modal Attention for Emotion Recognition.

Multimodal emotion classification (MEC) involves analyzing and identifying human emotions by integrating data from multiple sources, such as audio, video, and text. This approach leverages the complementary strengths of each modality to enhance the accuracy and robustness of emotion recognition systems. However, one significant challenge is effectively integrating these diverse data sources, each with unique characteristics and levels of noise. Additionally, the scarcity of large, annotated multimodal datasets in Bangla limits the training and evaluation of models. In this work, we unveiled a pioneering multimodal Bangla dataset, MAViT-Bangla (Multimodal Audio Video Text Bangla dataset). This dataset, comprising 1002 samples across audio, video, and text modalities, is a unique resource for emotion recognition studies in the Bangla language. It features emotional categories such as anger, fear, joy, and sadness, providing a comprehensive platform for research. Additionally, we developed a framework for audio, video and textual emotion recognition (i.e., AVaTER) that employs a cross-modal attention mechanism among unimodal features. This mechanism fosters the interaction and fusion of features from different modalities, enhancing the model's ability to capture nuanced emotional cues. The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated by achieving an F1-score of 0.64, a significant improvement over unimodal methods.