Backpropagation-Based Decoding for Multimodal Machine Translation.

People are able to describe images using thousands of languages, but languages share only one visual world. The aim of this work is to use the learned intermediate visual representations from a deep convolutional neural network to transfer information across languages for which paired data is not available in any form. Our work proposes using backpropagation-based decoding coupled with transformer-based multilingual-multimodal language models in order to obtain translations between any languages used during training. We particularly show the capabilities of this approach in the translation of German-Japanese and Japanese-German sentence pairs, given a training data of images freely associated with text in English, German, and Japanese but for which no single image contains annotations in both Japanese and German. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is also generally useful in the multilingual image captioning task when sentences in a second language are available at test time. The results of our method also compare favorably in the Multi30k dataset against recently proposed methods that are also aiming to leverage images as an intermediate source of translations.

Babytalk: understanding and generating simple image descriptions.

We present a system to automatically generate natural language descriptions from images. This system consists of two parts. The first part, content planning, smooths the output of computer vision-based detection and recognition algorithms with statistics mined from large pools of visually descriptive text to determine the best content words to use to describe an image. The second step, surface realization, chooses words to construct natural language sentences based on the predicted content and general statistics from natural language. We present multiple approaches for the surface realization step and evaluate each using automatic measures of similarity to human generated reference descriptions. We also collect forced choice human evaluations between descriptions from the proposed generation system and descriptions from competing approaches. The proposed system is very effective at producing relevant sentences for images. It also generates descriptions that are notably more true to the specific image content than previous work.