Domain-Specific Lexical Grounding in Noisy Visual-Textual Documents

Gregory Yauney, Jack Hessel, David Mimno


Abstract
Images can give us insights into the contextual meanings of words, but current image-text grounding approaches require detailed annotations. Such granular annotation is rare, expensive, and unavailable in most domain-specific contexts. In contrast, unlabeled multi-image, multi-sentence documents are abundant. Can lexical grounding be learned from such documents, even though they have significant lexical and visual overlap? Working with a case study dataset of real estate listings, we demonstrate the challenge of distinguishing highly correlated grounded terms, such as “kitchen” and “bedroom”, and introduce metrics to assess this document similarity. We present a simple unsupervised clustering-based method that increases precision and recall beyond object detection and image tagging baselines when evaluated on labeled subsets of the dataset. The proposed method is particularly effective for local contextual meanings of a word, for example associating “granite” with countertops in the real estate dataset and with rocky landscapes in a Wikipedia dataset.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.160
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2039–2045
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.160
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.160
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gregory Yauney, Jack Hessel, and David Mimno. 2020. Domain-Specific Lexical Grounding in Noisy Visual-Textual Documents. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2039–2045, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Domain-Specific Lexical Grounding in Noisy Visual-Textual Documents (Yauney et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.160.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939084
Code
 gyauney/domain-specific-lexical-grounding
Data
MS COCO