Brian Chen


2022

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Weakly-Supervised Temporal Article Grounding
Long Chen | Yulei Niu | Brian Chen | Xudong Lin | Guangxing Han | Christopher Thomas | Hammad Ayyubi | Heng Ji | Shih-Fu Chang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Given a long untrimmed video and natural language queries, video grounding (VG) aims to temporally localize the semantically-aligned video segments. Almost all existing VG work holds two simple but unrealistic assumptions: 1) All query sentences can be grounded in the corresponding video. 2) All query sentences for the same video are always at the same semantic scale. Unfortunately, both assumptions make today’s VG models fail to work in practice. For example, in real-world multimodal assets (eg, news articles), most of the sentences in the article can not be grounded in their affiliated videos, and they typically have rich hierarchical relations (ie, at different semantic scales). To this end, we propose a new challenging grounding task: Weakly-Supervised temporal Article Grounding (WSAG). Specifically, given an article and a relevant video, WSAG aims to localize all “groundable” sentences to the video, and these sentences are possibly at different semantic scales. Accordingly, we collect the first WSAG dataset to facilitate this task: YouwikiHow, which borrows the inherent multi-scale descriptions in wikiHow articles and plentiful YouTube videos. In addition, we propose a simple but effective method DualMIL for WSAG, which consists of a two-level MIL loss and a single-/cross- sentence constraint loss. These training objectives are carefully designed for these relaxed assumptions. Extensive ablations have verified the effectiveness of DualMIL.

2021

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Joint Multimedia Event Extraction from Video and Article
Brian Chen | Xudong Lin | Christopher Thomas | Manling Li | Shoya Yoshida | Lovish Chum | Heng Ji | Shih-Fu Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Visual and textual modalities contribute complementary information about events described in multimedia documents. Videos contain rich dynamics and detailed unfoldings of events, while text describes more high-level and abstract concepts. However, existing event extraction methods either do not handle video or solely target video while ignoring other modalities. In contrast, we propose the first approach to jointly extract events from both video and text articles. We introduce the new task of Video MultiMedia Event Extraction and propose two novel components to build the first system towards this task. First, we propose the first self-supervised cross-modal event coreference model that can determine coreference between video events and text events without any manually annotated pairs. Second, we introduce the first cross-modal transformer architecture, which extracts structured event information from both videos and text documents. We also construct and will publicly release a new benchmark of video-article pairs, consisting of 860 video-article pairs with extensive annotations for evaluating methods on this task. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on our new benchmark dataset. We achieve 6.0% and 5.8% absolute F-score gain on multimodal event coreference resolution and multimedia event extraction.

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RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System
Haoyang Wen | Ying Lin | Tuan Lai | Xiaoman Pan | Sha Li | Xudong Lin | Ben Zhou | Manling Li | Haoyu Wang | Hongming Zhang | Xiaodong Yu | Alexander Dong | Zhenhailong Wang | Yi Fung | Piyush Mishra | Qing Lyu | Dídac Surís | Brian Chen | Susan Windisch Brown | Martha Palmer | Chris Callison-Burch | Carl Vondrick | Jiawei Han | Dan Roth | Shih-Fu Chang | Heng Ji
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations

We present a new information extraction system that can automatically construct temporal event graphs from a collection of news documents from multiple sources, multiple languages (English and Spanish for our experiment), and multiple data modalities (speech, text, image and video). The system advances state-of-the-art from two aspects: (1) extending from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-lingual cross-media event extraction, coreference resolution and temporal event tracking; (2) using human curated event schema library to match and enhance the extraction output. We have made the dockerlized system publicly available for research purpose at GitHub, with a demo video.

2020

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GAIA: A Fine-grained Multimedia Knowledge Extraction System
Manling Li | Alireza Zareian | Ying Lin | Xiaoman Pan | Spencer Whitehead | Brian Chen | Bo Wu | Heng Ji | Shih-Fu Chang | Clare Voss | Daniel Napierski | Marjorie Freedman
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present the first comprehensive, open source multimedia knowledge extraction system that takes a massive stream of unstructured, heterogeneous multimedia data from various sources and languages as input, and creates a coherent, structured knowledge base, indexing entities, relations, and events, following a rich, fine-grained ontology. Our system, GAIA, enables seamless search of complex graph queries, and retrieves multimedia evidence including text, images and videos. GAIA achieves top performance at the recent NIST TAC SM-KBP2019 evaluation. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with a narrated video that documents the system.