Visually Grounded Compound PCFGs

Yanpeng Zhao, Ivan Titov


Abstract
Exploiting visual groundings for language understanding has recently been drawing much attention. In this work, we study visually grounded grammar induction and learn a constituency parser from both unlabeled text and its visual groundings. Existing work on this task (Shi et al., 2019) optimizes a parser via Reinforce and derives the learning signal only from the alignment of images and sentences. While their model is relatively accurate overall, its error distribution is very uneven, with low performance on certain constituents types (e.g., 26.2% recall on verb phrases, VPs) and high on others (e.g., 79.6% recall on noun phrases, NPs). This is not surprising as the learning signal is likely insufficient for deriving all aspects of phrase-structure syntax and gradient estimates are noisy. We show that using an extension of probabilistic context-free grammar model we can do fully-differentiable end-to-end visually grounded learning. Additionally, this enables us to complement the image-text alignment loss with a language modeling objective. On the MSCOCO test captions, our model establishes a new state of the art, outperforming its non-grounded version and, thus, confirming the effectiveness of visual groundings in constituency grammar induction. It also substantially outperforms the previous grounded model, with largest improvements on more ‘abstract’ categories (e.g., +55.1% recall on VPs).
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.354
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:
4369–4379
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.354
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.354
Award:
 Honorable Mention Paper
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yanpeng Zhao and Ivan Titov. 2020. Visually Grounded Compound PCFGs. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 4369–4379, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visually Grounded Compound PCFGs (Zhao & Titov, EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.354.pdf
Code
 zhaoyanpeng/vpcfg
Data
MS COCO