Describe Me an Auklet: Generating Grounded Perceptual Category Descriptions

Bill Noble, Nikolai Ilinykh


Abstract
Human speakers can generate descriptions of perceptual concepts, abstracted from the instance-level. Moreover, such descriptions can be used by other speakers to learn provisional representations of those concepts. Learning and using abstract perceptual concepts is under-investigated in the language-and-vision field. The problem is also highly relevant to the field of representation learning in multi-modal NLP. In this paper, we introduce a framework for testing category-level perceptual grounding in multi-modal language models. In particular, we train separate neural networks to **generate** and **interpret** descriptions of visual categories. We measure the *communicative success* of the two models with the zero-shot classification performance of the interpretation model, which we argue is an indicator of perceptual grounding. Using this framework, we compare the performance of *prototype*- and *exemplar*-based representations. Finally, we show that communicative success exposes performance issues in the generation model, not captured by traditional intrinsic NLG evaluation metrics, and argue that these issues stem from a failure to properly ground language in vision at the category level.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.580
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9330–9347
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.580
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.580
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bill Noble and Nikolai Ilinykh. 2023. Describe Me an Auklet: Generating Grounded Perceptual Category Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9330–9347, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Describe Me an Auklet: Generating Grounded Perceptual Category Descriptions (Noble & Ilinykh, EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.580.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.580.mp4