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Purdue University

Reasoning Across Language and Vision in Machines and Humans

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

<p>Humans not only outperform AI and computer-vision systems, but use an unknown computational mechanism to perform tasks for which no suitable approaches exist. I present work investigating both novel tasks and how humans approach them in the context of computer vision and linguistics. I demonstrate a system which, like children, acquires high-level linguistic knowledge about the world. Robots learn to play physically-instantiated board games and use that knowledge to engage in physical play. To further integrate language and vision I develop an approach which produces rich sentential descriptions of events depicted in videos. I then show how to simultaneously detect and track objects, recognize events, and produce sentences. This tighter integration of language and vision enables a novel task: sentential video retrieval. A video corpus can be searched for clips which depict a target sentence rather than just a collection of individual query words. This work assumes a compositional representation of events, composing sentence models from word models. Perhaps the reason why humans perform tasks such as the above with ease is because of a tight integration of language and vision exploiting the compositionality inherent in both modalities. I present work indicating that this may be the case. Humans are shown videos while fMRI data is acquired and sentences which describe those videos are recovered compositionally.</p>

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Level thesis:degree_level
Dissertation
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Year
2013

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Barbu, Andrei
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Jeffrey M. Siskind
  • Robert L. Givan
  • Thomas M. Talavage
  • Anthony G. Cohn

Subjects

dc:subject × 7

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-1033

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Purdue University
Base URL
docs.lib.purdue.edu/do/oai/
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Barbu, Andrei. Reasoning Across Language and Vision in Machines and Humans. Dissertation thesis, 2013. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/181