Storytelling is multi-modal in the real world. When one tells a story, one may use all of the visualizations and sounds along with the story itself. However, prior studies on storytelling datasets and tasks have paid little attention to sound even though sound also conveys meaningful semantics of the story. Therefore, we propose to extend story understanding and telling areas by establishing a new component called background sound which is story context-based audio without any linguistic information. For this purpose, we introduce a new dataset, called Sound of Story (SoS), which has paired image and text sequences with corresponding sound or background music for a story. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest well-curated dataset for storytelling with sound. Our SoS dataset consists of 27,354 stories with 19.6 images per story and 984 hours of speech-decoupled audio such as background music and other sounds. As benchmark tasks for storytelling with sound and the dataset, we propose retrieval tasks between modalities, and audio generation tasks from image-text sequences, introducing strong baselines for them. We believe the proposed dataset and tasks may shed light on the multi-modal understanding of storytelling in terms of sound.

Many researchers have tried to predict the accuracies of extrinsic evaluation by using intrinsic evaluation to evaluate word embedding. The relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation, however, has only been studied with simple correlation analysis, which has difficulty capturing complex cause-effect relationships and integrating external factors such as the hyperparameters of word embedding. To tackle this problem, we employ partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM), a method of structural equation modeling developed for causal analysis. We propose a causal diagram consisting of the evaluation results on the BATS, VecEval, and SentEval datasets, with a causal hypothesis that linguistic knowledge encoded in word embedding contributes to solving downstream tasks. Our PLS-PM models are estimated with 600 word embeddings, and we prove the existence of causal relations between linguistic knowledge evaluated on BATS and the accuracies of downstream tasks evaluated on VecEval and SentEval in our PLS-PM models. Moreover, we show that the PLS-PM models are useful for analyzing the effect of hyperparameters, including the training algorithm, corpus, dimension, and context window, and for validating the effectiveness of intrinsic evaluation.

In this paper, we evaluate the progress of our field toward solving simple factoid questions over a knowledge base, a practically important problem in natural language interface to database. As in other natural language understanding tasks, a common practice for this task is to train and evaluate a model on a single dataset, and recent studies suggest that SimpleQuestions, the most popular and largest dataset, is nearly solved under this setting. However, this common setting does not evaluate the robustness of the systems outside of the distribution of the used training data. We rigorously evaluate such robustness of existing systems using different datasets. Our analysis, including shifting of training and test datasets and training on a union of the datasets, suggests that our progress in solving SimpleQuestions dataset does not indicate the success of more general simple question answering. We discuss a possible future direction toward this goal.