Visual Grounding of Inter-lingual Word-Embeddings

Wafaa Mohammed, Hassan Shahmohammadi, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, R. Harald Baayen


Abstract
Visual grounding of Language aims at enriching textual representations of language with multiple sources of visual knowledge such as images and videos. Although visual grounding is an area of intense research, inter-lingual aspects of visual grounding have not received much attention. The present study investigates the inter-lingual visual grounding of word embeddings. We propose an implicit alignment technique between the two spaces of vision and language in which inter-lingual textual information interacts in order to enrich pre-trained textual word embeddings. We focus on three languages in our experiments, namely, English, Arabic, and German. We obtained visually grounded vector representations for these languages and studied whether visual grounding on one or multiple languages improved the performance of embeddings on word similarity and categorization benchmarks. Our experiments suggest that inter-lingual knowledge improves the performance of grounded embeddings in similar languages such as German and English. However, inter-lingual grounding of German or English with Arabic led to a slight degradation in performance on word similarity benchmarks. On the other hand, we observed an opposite trend on categorization benchmarks where Arabic had the most improvement on English. In the discussion section, several reasons for those findings are laid out. We hope that our experiments provide a baseline for further research on inter lingual visual grounding.
Anthology ID:
2022.umios-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Unimodal and Multimodal Induction of Linguistic Structures (UM-IoS)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Wenjuan Han, Zilong Zheng, Zhouhan Lin, Lifeng Jin, Yikang Shen, Yoon Kim, Kewei Tu
Venue:
UM-IoS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.umios-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.umios-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wafaa Mohammed, Hassan Shahmohammadi, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, and R. Harald Baayen. 2022. Visual Grounding of Inter-lingual Word-Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Unimodal and Multimodal Induction of Linguistic Structures (UM-IoS), pages 18–28, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Visual Grounding of Inter-lingual Word-Embeddings (Mohammed et al., UM-IoS 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.umios-1.3.pdf