MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering

Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, Radu Soricut


Abstract
Visual Question Answering (VQA) has been primarily studied through the lens of the English language. Yet, tackling VQA in other languages in the same manner would require a considerable amount of resources. In this paper, we propose scalable solutions to multilingual visual question answering (mVQA), on both data and modeling fronts. We first propose a translation-based framework to mVQA data generation that requires much less human annotation efforts than the conventional approach of directly collection questions and answers. Then, we apply our framework to the multilingual captions in the Crossmodal-3600 dataset and develop an efficient annotation protocol to create MaXM, a test-only VQA benchmark in 7 diverse languages. Finally, we develop a simple, lightweight, and effective approach as well as benchmark state-of-the-art English and multilingual VQA models. We hope that our benchmark encourages further research on mVQA.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.176
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2667–2682
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.176
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.176
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soravit Changpinyo, Linting Xue, Michal Yarom, Ashish Thapliyal, Idan Szpektor, Julien Amelot, Xi Chen, and Radu Soricut. 2023. MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2667–2682, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MaXM: Towards Multilingual Visual Question Answering (Changpinyo et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2023.findings-emnlp.176.pdf