Is an Image Worth More than a Thousand Words? On the Fine-Grain Semantic Differences between Visual and Linguistic Representations

Guillem Collell, Marie-Francine Moens

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Abstract
Human concept representations are often grounded with visual information, yet some aspects of meaning cannot be visually represented or are better described with language. Thus, vision and language provide complementary information that, properly combined, can potentially yield more complete concept representations. Recently, state-of-the-art distributional semantic models and convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in representing linguistic and visual knowledge respectively. In this paper, we compare both, visual and linguistic representations in their ability to capture different types of fine-grain semantic knowledge—or attributes—of concepts. Humans often describe objects using attributes, that is, properties such as shape, color or functionality, which often transcend the linguistic and visual modalities. In our setting, we evaluate how well attributes can be predicted by using the unimodal representations as inputs. We are interested in first, finding out whether attributes are generally better captured by either the vision or by the language modality; and second, if none of them is clearly superior (as we hypothesize), what type of attributes or semantic knowledge are better encoded from each modality. Ultimately, our study sheds light on the potential of combining visual and textual representations.
Anthology ID:
C16-1264
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
2807–2817
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1264
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guillem Collell and Marie-Francine Moens. 2016. Is an Image Worth More than a Thousand Words? On the Fine-Grain Semantic Differences between Visual and Linguistic Representations. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 2807–2817, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Is an Image Worth More than a Thousand Words? On the Fine-Grain Semantic Differences between Visual and Linguistic Representations (Collell & Moens, COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/teach-a-man-to-fish/C16-1264.pdf