Humans Meet Models on Object Naming: A New Dataset and Analysis

Carina Silberer, Sina Zarrieß, Matthijs Westera, Gemma Boleda


Abstract
We release ManyNames v2 (MN v2), a verified version of an object naming dataset that contains dozens of valid names per object for 25K images. We analyze issues in the data collection method originally employed, standard in Language & Vision (L&V), and find that the main source of noise in the data comes from simulating a naming context solely from an image with a target object marked with a bounding box, which causes subjects to sometimes disagree regarding which object is the target. We also find that both the degree of this uncertainty in the original data and the amount of true naming variation in MN v2 differs substantially across object domains. We use MN v2 to analyze a popular L&V model and demonstrate its effectiveness on the task of object naming. However, our fine-grained analysis reveals that what appears to be human-like model behavior is not stable across domains, e.g., the model confuses people and clothing objects much more frequently than humans do. We also find that standard evaluations underestimate the actual effectiveness of the naming model: on the single-label names of the original dataset (Visual Genome), it obtains −27% accuracy points than on MN v2, that includes all valid object names.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.172
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1893–1905
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.172
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.172
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carina Silberer, Sina Zarrieß, Matthijs Westera, and Gemma Boleda. 2020. Humans Meet Models on Object Naming: A New Dataset and Analysis. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1893–1905, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Humans Meet Models on Object Naming: A New Dataset and Analysis (Silberer et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2020.coling-main.172.pdf
Code
 amore-upf/manynames
Data
ImageNetVisual Genome