Natural language image description: data, models, and evaluation

Automatically describing an image with a concise natural language description is an ambitious and emerging task bringing together the Natural Language and Computer Vision communities. With any emerging task, the necessary groundwork developing appropriate datasets, strong baseline models, and evaluation frameworks is key. In this thesis, we introduce the rst large datasets speci cally designed with image description in mind, focusing on concrete descriptions that can be gleaned from the image alone. Furthermore, we develop strong baseline models that show the need to model language beyond a simple bag-of-words approach to increase performance. Most importantly, we introduce a ranking based framework for comparing image description models. We show that this framework is more reliable and accurate than the conventional wisdom of evaluating on novel model generated text. As this task has gained popularity recently, we further analyze the drawbacks of current evaluation methods, and put forth concrete extensions to our ranking framework that will guide progress towards modeling the association of natural language and the images the language describes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Hodosh, Micah A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hockenmaier, Julia
• Dolan, Bill
• Forsyth, David
• Roth, Dan

• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing
• Image Description
• Neural Networks
• computer vision (CV)
• natural language processing (NLP)
• Machine Learning
• Machine Learning Applications
• Image Captioning

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2015 Micah A Hodosh

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89008

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F89008