Strong and Simple Baselines for Multimodal Utterance Embeddings

Paul Pu Liang, Yao Chong Lim, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency


Abstract
Human language is a rich multimodal signal consisting of spoken words, facial expressions, body gestures, and vocal intonations. Learning representations for these spoken utterances is a complex research problem due to the presence of multiple heterogeneous sources of information. Recent advances in multimodal learning have followed the general trend of building more complex models that utilize various attention, memory and recurrent components. In this paper, we propose two simple but strong baselines to learn embeddings of multimodal utterances. The first baseline assumes a conditional factorization of the utterance into unimodal factors. Each unimodal factor is modeled using the simple form of a likelihood function obtained via a linear transformation of the embedding. We show that the optimal embedding can be derived in closed form by taking a weighted average of the unimodal features. In order to capture richer representations, our second baseline extends the first by factorizing into unimodal, bimodal, and trimodal factors, while retaining simplicity and efficiency during learning and inference. From a set of experiments across two tasks, we show strong performance on both supervised and semi-supervised multimodal prediction, as well as significant (10 times) speedups over neural models during inference. Overall, we believe that our strong baseline models offer new benchmarking options for future research in multimodal learning.
Anthology ID:
N19-1267
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2599–2609
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1267
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1267
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Pu Liang, Yao Chong Lim, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Louis-Philippe Morency. 2019. Strong and Simple Baselines for Multimodal Utterance Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 2599–2609, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Strong and Simple Baselines for Multimodal Utterance Embeddings (Liang et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1267.pdf
Supplementary:
 N19-1267.Supplementary.pdf
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/364226255
Code
 yaochie/multimodal-baselines