Video-based Sign Language Recognition without Temporal Segmentation

Millions of hearing impaired people around the world routinely use some variants of sign languages to communicate, thus the automatic translation of a sign language is meaningful and important. Currently, there are two sub-problems in Sign Language Recognition (SLR), i.e., isolated SLR that recognizes word by word and continuous SLR that translates entire sentences. Existing continuous SLR methods typically utilize isolated SLRs as building blocks, with an extra layer of preprocessing (temporal segmentation) and another layer of post-processing (sentence synthesis). Unfortunately, temporal segmentation itself is non-trivial and inevitably propagates errors into subsequent steps. Worse still, isolated SLR methods typically require strenuous labeling of each word separately in a sentence, severely limiting the amount of attainable training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel continuous sign recognition framework, the Hierarchical Attention Network with Latent Space (LS-HAN), which eliminates the preprocessing of temporal segmentation. The proposed LS-HAN consists of three components: a two-stream Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for video feature representation generation, a Latent Space (LS) for semantic gap bridging, and a Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) for latent space based recognition. Experiments are carried out on two large scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.Comment: 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), Feb. 2-7, 2018, New Orleans, Louisiana, US

Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks

While recent studies have looked into the abilities of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc, there have been few studies looking into the controllability of large language models on generation tasks. We present an extensive analysis of various benchmarks including a sentence planning benchmark with different granularities. After comparing large language models against state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models, we present a spectrum showing large language models falling behind, are comparable, or exceed the ability of smaller models. We conclude that **large language models struggle at meeting fine-grained hard constraints**.Comment: EMNLP 202

Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements

Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions. Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure the importance of each of these information channels by systematically incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, CO, US