1 The code for reproducing the results reported in this paper can be found at https://github.com/ dsg-bielefeld/image_wac.
CodeThe code required for reproducing the results reported here can be found at https://github.com/dsg-bielefeld/ image_wac.
Research on generating referring expressions has so far mostly focussed on "oneshot reference", where the aim is to generate a single, discriminating expression. In interactive settings, however, it is not uncommon for reference to be established in "installments", where referring information is offered piecewise until success has been confirmed. We show that this strategy can also be advantageous in technical systems that only have uncertain access to object attributes and categories. We train a recently introduced model of grounded word meaning on a data set of REs for objects in images and learn to predict semantically appropriate expressions. In a human evaluation, we observe that users are sensitive to inadequate object names -which unfortunately are not unlikely to be generated from low-level visual input. We propose a solution inspired from human task-oriented interaction and implement strategies for avoiding and repairing semantically inaccurate words. We enhance a word-based REG with contextaware, referential installments and find that they substantially improve the referential success of the system.
We present a dataset consisting of what we call image description sequences. These multisentence descriptions of the contents of an image were collected in a pseudo-interactive setting, where the describer was told to describe the given image to a listener who needs to identify the image within a set of images, and who successively asks for more information. As we show, this setup produced nicely structured data that, we think, will be useful for learning models capable of planning and realising such description discourses.
Based on a study of verb translations in the Europarl corpus, we argue that a wide range of MWE patterns can be identified in translations that exhibit a correspondence between a single lexical item in the source language and a group of lexical items in the target language. We show that these correspondences can be reliably detected on dependency-parsed, word-aligned sentences. We propose an extraction method that combines word alignment with syntactic filters and is independent of the structural pattern of the translation.
Colour terms have been a prime phenomenon for studying language grounding, though previous work focussed mostly on descriptions of simple objects or colour swatches. This paper investigates whether colour terms can be learned from more realistic and potentially noisy visual inputs, using a corpus of referring expressions to objects represented as regions in real-world images. We obtain promising results from combining a classifier that grounds colour terms in visual input with a recalibration model that adjusts probability distributions over colour terms according to contextual and object-specific preferences.
Zero-shot learning in Language & Vision is the task of correctly labelling (or naming) objects of novel categories. Another strand of work in L&V aims at pragmatically informative rather than "correct" object descriptions, e.g. in reference games. We combine these lines of research and model zero-shot reference games, where a speaker needs to successfully refer to a novel object in an image. Inspired by models of "rational speech acts", we extend a neural generator to become a pragmatic speaker reasoning about uncertain object categories. As a result of this reasoning, the generator produces fewer nouns and names of distractor categories as compared to a literal speaker. We show that this conversational strategy for dealing with novel objects often improves communicative success, in terms of resolution accuracy of an automatic listener.
Natural language as a modality of interaction is becoming increasingly popular in the field of visualization. In addition to the popular query interfaces, other language-based interactions such as annotations, recommendations, explanations, or documentation experience growing interest. In this survey, we provide an overview of natural language-based interaction in the research area of visualization. We discuss a renowned taxonomy of visualization tasks and classify 119 related works to illustrate the stateof-the-art of how current natural language interfaces support their performance. We examine applied NLP methods and discuss humanmachine dialogue structures with a focus on initiative, duration, and communicative functions in recent visualization-oriented dialogue interfaces. Based on this overview, we point out interesting areas for the future application of NLP methods in the field of visualization.
RNN-based sequence generation is now widely used in NLP and NLG (natural language generation). Most work focusses on how to train RNNs, even though also decoding is not necessarily straightforward: previous work on neural MT found seq2seq models to radically prefer short candidates, and has proposed a number of beam search heuristics to deal with this. In this work, we assess decoding strategies for referring expression generation with neural models. Here, expression length is crucial: output should neither contain too much or too little information, in order to be pragmatically adequate. We find that most beam search heuristics developed for MT do not generalize well to referring expression generation (REG), and do not generally outperform greedy decoding. We observe that beam search heuristics for termination seem to override the model's knowledge of what a good stopping point is. Therefore, we also explore a recent approach called trainable decoding, which uses a small network to modify the RNN's hidden state for better decoding results. We find this approach to consistently outperform greedy decoding for REG.
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