MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Representations Across Languages

Aashi Jain, Mandy Guo, Krishna Srinivasan, Ting Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Chao Jia, Yinfei Yang, Jason Baldridge


Abstract
Both image-caption pairs and translation pairs provide the means to learn deep representations of and connections between languages. We use both types of pairs in MURAL (MUltimodal, MUltitask Representations Across Languages), a dual encoder that solves two tasks: 1) image-text matching and 2) translation pair matching. By incorporating billions of translation pairs, MURAL extends ALIGN (Jia et al.)–a state-of-the-art dual encoder learned from 1.8 billion noisy image-text pairs. When using the same encoders, MURAL’s performance matches or exceeds ALIGN’s cross-modal retrieval performance on well-resourced languages across several datasets. More importantly, it considerably improves performance on under-resourced languages, showing that text-text learning can overcome a paucity of image-caption examples for these languages. On the Wikipedia Image-Text dataset, for example, MURAL-base improves zero-shot mean recall by 8.1% on average for eight under-resourced languages and by 6.8% on average when fine-tuning. We additionally show that MURAL’s text representations cluster not only with respect to genealogical connections but also based on areal linguistics, such as the Balkan Sprachbund.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.293
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3449–3463
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.293
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.293
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aashi Jain, Mandy Guo, Krishna Srinivasan, Ting Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Chao Jia, Yinfei Yang, and Jason Baldridge. 2021. MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Representations Across Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3449–3463, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MURAL: Multimodal, Multitask Representations Across Languages (Jain et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.293.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.293.mp4
Data
CxCFlickr30kMS COCOWIT