Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics
Elisa Kreiss, Cynthia Bennett, Shayan Hooshmand, Eric Zelikman, Meredith Ringel Morris, Christopher Potts
Abstract
Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics – those that don’t rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions – on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.emnlp-main.309
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4685–4697
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.309
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Elisa Kreiss, Cynthia Bennett, Shayan Hooshmand, Eric Zelikman, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Christopher Potts. 2022. Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4685–4697, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics (Kreiss et al., EMNLP 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/2022.emnlp-main.309.pdf