Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The accuracy of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has improved, but it is still imperfect in many settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but WER has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance on many applications. We propose a new captioning-focused evaluation metric that better predicts the impact of ASR recognition errors on the usability of automatically generated captions for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH). Through a user study with 30 DHH users, we compared our new metric with the traditional WER metric on a caption usability evaluation task. In a side-by-side comparison of pairs of ASR text output (with identical WER), the texts preferred by our new metric were preferred by DHH participants. Further, our metric had significantly higher correlation with DHH participants' subjective scores on the usability of a caption, as compared to the correlation between WER metric and participant subjective scores. This new metric could be used to select ASR systems for captioning applications, and it may be a better metric for ASR researchers to consider when optimizing ASR systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17

Text-image synergy for multimodal retrieval and annotation

Text and images are the two most common data modalities found on the Internet. Understanding the synergy between text and images, that is, seamlessly analyzing information from these modalities may be trivial for humans, but is challenging for software systems. In this dissertation we study problems where deciphering text-image synergy is crucial for finding solutions. We propose methods and ideas that establish semantic connections between text and images in multimodal contents, and empirically show their effectiveness in four interconnected problems: Image Retrieval, Image Tag Refinement, Image-Text Alignment, and Image Captioning. Our promising results and observations open up interesting scopes for future research involving text-image data understanding.Text and images are the two most common data modalities found on the Internet. Understanding the synergy between text and images, that is, seamlessly analyzing information from these modalities may be trivial for humans, but is challenging for software systems. In this dissertation we study problems where deciphering text-image synergy is crucial for finding solutions. We propose methods and ideas that establish semantic connections between text and images in multimodal contents, and empirically show their effectiveness in four interconnected problems: Image Retrieval, Image Tag Refinement, Image-Text Alignment, and Image Captioning. Our promising results and observations open up interesting scopes for future research involving text-image data understanding.Text und Bild sind die beiden häufigsten Arten von Inhalten im Internet. Während es für Menschen einfach ist, gerade aus dem Zusammenspiel von Text- und Bildinhalten Informationen zu erfassen, stellt diese kombinierte Darstellung von Inhalten Softwaresysteme vor große Herausforderungen. In dieser Dissertation werden Probleme studiert, für deren Lösung das Verständnis des Zusammenspiels von Text- und Bildinhalten wesentlich ist. Es werden Methoden und Vorschläge präsentiert und empirisch bewertet, die semantische Verbindungen zwischen Text und Bild in multimodalen Daten herstellen. Wir stellen in dieser Dissertation vier miteinander verbundene Text- und Bildprobleme vor: • Bildersuche. Ob Bilder anhand von textbasierten Suchanfragen gefunden werden, hängt stark davon ab, ob der Text in der Nähe des Bildes mit dem der Anfrage übereinstimmt. Bilder ohne textuellen Kontext, oder sogar mit thematisch passendem Kontext, aber ohne direkte Übereinstimmungen der vorhandenen Schlagworte zur Suchanfrage, können häufig nicht gefunden werden. Zur Abhilfe schlagen wir vor, drei Arten von Informationen in Kombination zu nutzen: visuelle Informationen (in Form von automatisch generierten Bildbeschreibungen), textuelle Informationen (Stichworte aus vorangegangenen Suchanfragen), und Alltagswissen. • Verbesserte Bildbeschreibungen. Bei der Objekterkennung durch Computer Vision kommt es des Öfteren zu Fehldetektionen und Inkohärenzen. Die korrekte Identifikation von Bildinhalten ist jedoch eine wichtige Voraussetzung für die Suche nach Bildern mittels textueller Suchanfragen. Um die Fehleranfälligkeit bei der Objekterkennung zu minimieren, schlagen wir vor Alltagswissen einzubeziehen. Durch zusätzliche Bild-Annotationen, welche sich durch den gesunden Menschenverstand als thematisch passend erweisen, können viele fehlerhafte und zusammenhanglose Erkennungen vermieden werden. • Bild-Text Platzierung. Auf Internetseiten mit Text- und Bildinhalten (wie Nachrichtenseiten, Blogbeiträge, Artikel in sozialen Medien) werden Bilder in der Regel an semantisch sinnvollen Positionen im Textfluss platziert. Wir nutzen dies um ein Framework vorzuschlagen, in dem relevante Bilder ausgesucht werden und mit den passenden Abschnitten eines Textes assoziiert werden. • Bildunterschriften. Bilder, die als Teil von multimodalen Inhalten zur Verbesserung der Lesbarkeit von Texten dienen, haben typischerweise Bildunterschriften, die zum Kontext des umgebenden Texts passen. Wir schlagen vor, den Kontext beim automatischen Generieren von Bildunterschriften ebenfalls einzubeziehen. Üblicherweise werden hierfür die Bilder allein analysiert. Wir stellen die kontextbezogene Bildunterschriftengenerierung vor. Unsere vielversprechenden Beobachtungen und Ergebnisse eröffnen interessante Möglichkeiten für weitergehende Forschung zur computergestützten Erfassung des Zusammenspiels von Text- und Bildinhalten

Object Referring in Videos with Language and Human Gaze

We investigate the problem of object referring (OR) i.e. to localize a target object in a visual scene coming with a language description. Humans perceive the world more as continued video snippets than as static images, and describe objects not only by their appearance, but also by their spatio-temporal context and motion features. Humans also gaze at the object when they issue a referring expression. Existing works for OR mostly focus on static images only, which fall short in providing many such cues. This paper addresses OR in videos with language and human gaze. To that end, we present a new video dataset for OR, with 30, 000 objects over 5, 000 stereo video sequences annotated for their descriptions and gaze. We further propose a novel network model for OR in videos, by integrating appearance, motion, gaze, and spatio-temporal context into one network. Experimental results show that our method effectively utilizes motion cues, human gaze, and spatio-temporal context. Our method outperforms previousOR methods. For dataset and code, please refer https://people.ee.ethz.ch/~arunv/ORGaze.html.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018, 10 pages, 6 figure

A Survey of Current Datasets for Vision and Language Research

Integrating vision and language has long been a dream in work on artificial intelligence (AI). In the past two years, we have witnessed an explosion of work that brings together vision and language from images to videos and beyond. The available corpora have played a crucial role in advancing this area of research. In this paper, we propose a set of quality metrics for evaluating and analyzing the vision & language datasets and categorize them accordingly. Our analyses show that the most recent datasets have been using more complex language and more abstract concepts, however, there are different strengths and weaknesses in each.Comment: To appear in EMNLP 2015, short proceedings. Dataset analysis and discussion expanded, including an initial examination into reporting bias for one of them. F.F. and N.M. contributed equally to this wor

Person Search with Natural Language Description

Searching persons in large-scale image databases with the query of natural language description has important applications in video surveillance. Existing methods mainly focused on searching persons with image-based or attribute-based queries, which have major limitations for a practical usage. In this paper, we study the problem of person search with natural language description. Given the textual description of a person, the algorithm of the person search is required to rank all the samples in the person database then retrieve the most relevant sample corresponding to the queried description. Since there is no person dataset or benchmark with textual description available, we collect a large-scale person description dataset with detailed natural language annotations and person samples from various sources, termed as CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES). A wide range of possible models and baselines have been evaluated and compared on the person search benchmark. An Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Neural Attention mechanism (GNA-RNN) is proposed to establish the state-of-the art performance on person search

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl