What is the Role of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in an Image Caption Generator?

Marc Tanti, Albert Gatt, Kenneth Camilleri


Abstract
Image captioning has evolved into a core task for Natural Language Generation and has also proved to be an important testbed for deep learning approaches to handling multimodal representations. Most contemporary approaches rely on a combination of a convolutional network to handle image features, and a recurrent network to encode linguistic information. The latter is typically viewed as the primary “generation” component. Beyond this high-level characterisation, a CNN+RNN model supports a variety of architectural designs. The dominant model in the literature is one in which visual features encoded by a CNN are “injected” as part of the linguistic encoding process, driving the RNN’s linguistic choices. By contrast, it is possible to envisage an architecture in which visual and linguistic features are encoded separately, and merged at a subsequent stage. In this paper, we address two related questions: (1) Is direct injection the best way of combining multimodal information, or is a late merging alternative better for the image captioning task? (2) To what extent should a recurrent network be viewed as actually generating, rather than simply encoding, linguistic information?
Anthology ID:
W17-3506
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Editors:
Jose M. Alonso, Alberto Bugarín, Ehud Reiter
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51–60
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3506
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-3506
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marc Tanti, Albert Gatt, and Kenneth Camilleri. 2017. What is the Role of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in an Image Caption Generator?. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 51–60, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What is the Role of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in an Image Caption Generator? (Tanti et al., INLG 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3506.pdf
Code
 mtanti/rnn-role +  additional community code
Data
Flickr30kMS COCO