In Visual Question Answering (VQA), existing bilinear methods focus on the interaction between images and questions. As a result, the answers are either spliced into the questions or utilized as labels only for classification. On the other hand, trilinear models such as the CTI model efficiently utilize the inter-modality information between answers, questions, and images, while ignoring intra-modality information. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new trilinear interaction framework called MIRTT (Learning Multimodal Interaction Representations from Trilinear Transformers), incorporating the attention mechanisms for capturing inter-modality and intra-modality relationships. Moreover, we design a two-stage workflow where a bilinear model reduces the free-form, open-ended VQA problem into a multiple-choice VQA problem. Furthermore, to obtain accurate and generic multimodal representations, we pre-train MIRTT with masked language prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Visual7W Telling task and VQA-1.0 Multiple Choice task and outperforms bilinear baselines on the VQA-2.0, TDIUC and GQA datasets.

Ordinal Classification (OC) is an important classification task where the classes are ordinal. For example, an OC task for sentiment analysis could have the following classes: highly positive, positive, neutral, negative, highly negative. Clearly, evaluation measures for an OC task should penalise misclassifications by considering the ordinal nature of the classes. Ordinal Quantification (OQ) is a related task where the gold data is a distribution over ordinal classes, and the system is required to estimate this distribution. Evaluation measures for an OQ task should also take the ordinal nature of the classes into account. However, for both OC and OQ, there are only a small number of known evaluation measures that meet this basic requirement. In the present study, we utilise data from the SemEval and NTCIR communities to clarify the properties of nine evaluation measures in the context of OC tasks, and six measures in the context of OQ tasks.

This paper presents a deep neural architecture which applies the siamese convolutional neural network sharing model parameters for learning a semantic similarity metric between two sentences. In addition, two different similarity metrics (i.e., the Cosine Similarity and Manhattan similarity) are compared based on this architecture. Our experiments in binary similarity classification for Chinese sentence pairs show that the proposed siamese convolutional architecture with Manhattan similarity outperforms the baselines (i.e., the siamese Long Short-Term Memory architecture and the siamese Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory architecture) by 8.7 points in accuracy.

Pictures can enrich storytelling experiences. We propose a framework that can automatically compose a picture book by understanding story text and visualizing it with painting elements, i.e., characters and backgrounds. For story understanding, we extract key information from a story on both sentence level and paragraph level, including characters, scenes and actions. These concepts are organized and visualized in a way that depicts the development of a story. We collect a set of Chinese stories for children and apply our approach to compose pictures for stories. Extensive experiments are conducted towards story event extraction for visualization to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.