Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze

Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, Lisa Beinborn, Raquel Fernández


Abstract
When speakers describe an image, they tend to look at objects before mentioning them. In this paper, we investigate such sequential cross-modal alignment by modelling the image description generation process computationally. We take as our starting point a state-of-the-art image captioning system and develop several model variants that exploit information from human gaze patterns recorded during language production. In particular, we propose the first approach to image description generation where visual processing is modelled sequentially. Our experiments and analyses confirm that better descriptions can be obtained by exploiting gaze-driven attention and shed light on human cognitive processes by comparing different ways of aligning the gaze modality with language production. We find that processing gaze data sequentially leads to descriptions that are better aligned to those produced by speakers, more diverse, and more natural—particularly when gaze is encoded with a dedicated recurrent component.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.377
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:
4664–4677
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.377
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.377
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ece Takmaz, Sandro Pezzelle, Lisa Beinborn, and Raquel Fernández. 2020. Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 4664–4677, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze (Takmaz et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.377.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938696
Code
 dmg-illc/didec-seq-gen
Data
MS COCO