What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues

Xintong Yu, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yan Song, Changshui Zhang

Abstract
Grounding a pronoun to a visual object it refers to requires complex reasoning from various information sources, especially in conversational scenarios. For example, when people in a conversation talk about something all speakers can see, they often directly use pronouns (e.g., it) to refer to it without previous introduction. This fact brings a huge challenge for modern natural language understanding systems, particularly conventional context-based pronoun coreference models. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we formally define the task of visual-aware pronoun coreference resolution (PCR) and introduce VisPro, a large-scale dialogue PCR dataset, to investigate whether and how the visual information can help resolve pronouns in dialogues. We then propose a novel visual-aware PCR model, VisCoref, for this task and conduct comprehensive experiments and case studies on our dataset. Results demonstrate the importance of the visual information in this PCR case and show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Anthology ID:
D19-1516
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5123–5132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1516
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1516
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xintong Yu, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yan Song, and Changshui Zhang. 2019. What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5123–5132, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What You See is What You Get: Visual Pronoun Coreference Resolution in Dialogues (Yu et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/D19-1516.pdf
Code
 HKUST-KnowComp/Visual_PCR
Data
VisPro, VisDial
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