Human-Guided Modality Informativeness for Affective States

This paper studies the hypothesis that not all modalities are always needed to predict affective states. We explore this hypothesis in the context of recognizing three affective states that have shown a relation to a future onset of depression: positive, aggressive, and dysphoric. In particular, we investigate three important modalities for face-to-face conversations: vision, language, and acoustic modality. We first perform a human study to better understand which subset of modalities people find informative, when recognizing three affective states. As a second contribution, we explore how these human annotations can guide automatic affect recognition systems to be more interpretable while not degrading their predictive performance. Our studies show that humans can reliably annotate modality informativeness. Further, we observe that guided models significantly improve interpretability, i.e., they attend to modalities similarly to how humans rate the modality informativeness, while at the same time showing a slight increase in predictive performance.