CapWAP: Image Captioning with a Purpose

Adam Fisch, Kenton Lee, Ming-Wei Chang, Jonathan Clark, Regina Barzilay


Abstract
The traditional image captioning task uses generic reference captions to provide textual information about images. Different user populations, however, will care about different visual aspects of images. In this paper, we propose a new task, Captioning with A Purpose (CapWAP). Our goal is to develop systems that can be tailored to be useful for the information needs of an intended population, rather than merely provide generic information about an image. In this task, we use question-answer (QA) pairs—a natural expression of information need—from users, instead of reference captions, for both training and post-inference evaluation. We show that it is possible to use reinforcement learning to directly optimize for the intended information need, by rewarding outputs that allow a question answering model to provide correct answers to sampled user questions. We convert several visual question answering datasets into CapWAP datasets, and demonstrate that under a variety of scenarios our purposeful captioning system learns to anticipate and fulfill specific information needs better than its generic counterparts, as measured by QA performance on user questions from unseen images, when using the caption alone as context.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.705
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8755–8768
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.705
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.705
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Fisch, Kenton Lee, Ming-Wei Chang, Jonathan Clark, and Regina Barzilay. 2020. CapWAP: Image Captioning with a Purpose. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8755–8768, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CapWAP: Image Captioning with a Purpose (Fisch et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.705.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939091