Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Language

Pratyay Banerjee, Shweti Mahajan, Kushal Arora, Chitta Baral, Oriana Riva


Abstract
Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.519
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6992–7007
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.519
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pratyay Banerjee, Shweti Mahajan, Kushal Arora, Chitta Baral, and Oriana Riva. 2022. Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Language. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 6992–7007, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Language (Banerjee et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.findings-emnlp.519.pdf