%0 Conference Proceedings %T DEBUG: A Dense Bottom-Up Grounding Approach for Natural Language Video Localization %A Lu, Chujie %A Chen, Long %A Tan, Chilie %A Li, Xiaolin %A Xiao, Jun %Y Inui, Kentaro %Y Jiang, Jing %Y Ng, Vincent %Y Wan, Xiaojun %S Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) %D 2019 %8 November %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Hong Kong, China %F lu-etal-2019-debug %X In this paper, we focus on natural language video localization: localizing (ie, grounding) a natural language description in a long and untrimmed video sequence. All currently published models for addressing this problem can be categorized into two types: (i) top-down approach: it does classification and regression for a set of pre-cut video segment candidates; (ii) bottom-up approach: it directly predicts probabilities for each video frame as the temporal boundaries (ie, start and end time point). However, both two approaches suffer several limitations: the former is computation-intensive for densely placed candidates, while the latter has trailed the performance of the top-down counterpart thus far. To this end, we propose a novel dense bottom-up framework: DEnse Bottom-Up Grounding (DEBUG). DEBUG regards all frames falling in the ground truth segment as foreground, and each foreground frame regresses the unique distances from its location to bi-directional ground truth boundaries. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks (TACoS, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet Captions) show that DEBUG is able to match the speed of bottom-up models while surpassing the performance of the state-of-the-art top-down models. %R 10.18653/v1/D19-1518 %U https://aclanthology.org/D19-1518 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1518 %P 5144-5153