Multimodal sentiment analysis is a very actively growing field of research. A
promising area of opportunity in this field is to improve the multimodal fusion
mechanism. We present a novel feature fusion strategy that proceeds in a
hierarchical fashion, first fusing the modalities two in two and only then
fusing all three modalities. On multimodal sentiment analysis of individual
utterances, our strategy outperforms conventional concatenation of features by
1%, which amounts to 5% reduction in error rate. On utterance-level multimodal
sentiment analysis of multi-utterance video clips, for which current
state-of-the-art techniques incorporate contextual information from other
utterances of the same clip, our hierarchical fusion gives up to 2.4% (almost
10% error rate reduction) over currently used concatenation. The implementation
of our method is publicly available in the form of open-source code.

本论文提出了一种新的特征融合策略并应用在情感分析中，该策略通过分层融合两种模态，然后再将其与第三种模态融合，在个别话语的情感分析和视频剪辑的情感分析中均取得了优异的效果。