Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts

Julia Kruk, Jonah Lubin, Karan Sikka, Xiao Lin, Dan Jurafsky, Ajay Divakaran


Abstract
Computing author intent from multimodal data like Instagram posts requires modeling a complex relationship between text and image. For example, a caption might evoke an ironic contrast with the image, so neither caption nor image is a mere transcript of the other. Instead they combine—via what has been called meaning multiplication (Bateman et al.)- to create a new meaning that has a more complex relation to the literal meanings of text and image. Here we introduce a multimodal dataset of 1299 Instagram posts labeled for three orthogonal taxonomies: the authorial intent behind the image-caption pair, the contextual relationship between the literal meanings of the image and caption, and the semiotic relationship between the signified meanings of the image and caption. We build a baseline deep multimodal classifier to validate the taxonomy, showing that employing both text and image improves intent detection by 9.6 compared to using only the image modality, demonstrating the commonality of non-intersective meaning multiplication. The gain with multimodality is greatest when the image and caption diverge semiotically. Our dataset offers a new resource for the study of the rich meanings that result from pairing text and image.
Anthology ID:
D19-1469
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4622–4632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1469
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1469
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julia Kruk, Jonah Lubin, Karan Sikka, Xiao Lin, Dan Jurafsky, and Ajay Divakaran. 2019. Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4622–4632, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Text and Image: Determining Multimodal Document Intent in Instagram Posts (Kruk et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1469.pdf
Code
 karansikka1/documentIntent_emnlp19
Data
MDID