Object Naming in Language and Vision: A Survey and a New Dataset

Carina Silberer, Sina Zarrieß, Gemma Boleda


Abstract
People choose particular names for objects, such as dog or puppy for a given dog. Object naming has been studied in Psycholinguistics, but has received relatively little attention in Computational Linguistics. We review resources from Language and Vision that could be used to study object naming on a large scale, discuss their shortcomings, and create a new dataset that affords more opportunities for analysis and modeling. Our dataset, ManyNames, provides 36 name annotations for each of 25K objects in images selected from VisualGenome. We highlight the challenges involved and provide a preliminary analysis of the ManyNames data, showing that there is a high level of agreement in naming, on average. At the same time, the average number of name types associated with an object is much higher in our dataset than in existing corpora for Language and Vision, such that ManyNames provides a rich resource for studying phenomena like hierarchical variation (chihuahua vs. dog), which has been discussed at length in the theoretical literature, and other less well studied phenomena like cross-classification (cake vs. dessert).
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.710
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5792–5801
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.710
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carina Silberer, Sina Zarrieß, and Gemma Boleda. 2020. Object Naming in Language and Vision: A Survey and a New Dataset. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5792–5801, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Object Naming in Language and Vision: A Survey and a New Dataset (Silberer et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.710.pdf