We propose Lighthouse, a user-friendly library for reproducible video moment retrieval and highlight detection (MR-HD). Although researchers proposed various MR-HD approaches, the research community holds two main issues. The first is a lack of comprehensive and reproducible experiments across various methods, datasets, and video-text features.This is because no unified training and evaluation codebase covers multiple settings. The second is user-unfriendly design. Because previous works use different libraries, researchers set up individual environments. In addition, most works release only the training codes, requiring users to implement the whole inference process of MR-HD. Lighthouse addresses these issues by implementing a unified reproducible codebase that includes six models, three features, and five datasets. In addition, it provides an inference API and web demo to make these methods easily accessible for researchers and developers. Our experiments demonstrate that Lighthouse generally reproduces the reported scores in the reference papers. The code is available at https://github.com/line/lighthouse.

Geoparsing is the task of estimating the latitude and longitude (coordinates) of location expressions in texts. Geoparsing must deal with the ambiguity of the expressions that indicate multiple locations with the same notation. For evaluating geoparsing systems, several corpora have been proposed in previous work. However, these corpora are small-scale and suffer from the coverage of location expressions on general domains. In this paper, we propose Wikipedia Hyperlink-based Location Linking (WHLL), a novel method to construct a large-scale corpus for geoparsing from Wikipedia articles. WHLL leverages hyperlinks in Wikipedia to annotate multiple location expressions with coordinates. With this method, we constructed the WHLL corpus, a new large-scale corpus for geoparsing. The WHLL corpus consists of 1.3M articles, each containing about 7.8 unique location expressions. 45.6% of location expressions are ambiguous and refer to more than one location with the same notation. In each article, location expressions of the article title and those hyperlinks to other articles are assigned with coordinates. By utilizing hyperlinks, we can accurately assign location expressions with coordinates even with ambiguous location expressions in the texts. Experimental results show that there remains room for improvement by disambiguating location expressions.

We focus on image description and a corresponding assessment system for language learners. To achieve automatic assessment of image description, we construct a novel dataset, the Language Learner Image Description (LLID) dataset, which consists of images, their descriptions, and assessment annotations. Then, we propose a novel task of automatic error correction for image description, and we develop a baseline model that encodes multimodal information from a learner sentence with an image and accurately decodes a corrected sentence. Our experimental results show that the developed model can revise errors that cannot be revised without an image.

We present a new multimodal dataset called Visual Recipe Flow, which enables us to learn a cooking action result for each object in a recipe text. The dataset consists of object state changes and the workflow of the recipe text. The state change is represented as an image pair, while the workflow is represented as a recipe flow graph. We developed a web interface to reduce human annotation costs. The dataset allows us to try various applications, including multimodal information retrieval.

In this paper, we provide a dataset that gives visual grounding annotations to recipe flow graphs. A recipe flow graph is a representation of the cooking workflow, which is designed with the aim of understanding the workflow from natural language processing. Such a workflow will increase its value when grounded to real-world activities, and visual grounding is a way to do so. Visual grounding is provided as bounding boxes to image sequences of recipes, and each bounding box is linked to an element of the workflow. Because the workflows are also linked to the text, this annotation gives visual grounding with workflow’s contextual information between procedural text and visual observation in an indirect manner. We subsidiarily annotated two types of event attributes with each bounding box: “doing-the-action,” or “done-the-action”. As a result of the annotation, we got 2,300 bounding boxes in 272 flow graph recipes. Various experiments showed that the proposed dataset enables us to estimate contextual information described in recipe flow graphs from an image sequence.

Multimedia procedural texts, such as instructions and manuals with pictures, support people to share how-to knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method for generating a procedural text given a photo sequence allowing users to obtain a multimedia procedural text. We propose a single embedding space both for image and text enabling to interconnect them and to select appropriate words to describe a photo. We implemented our method and tested it on cooking instructions, i.e., recipes. Various experimental results showed that our method outperforms standard baselines.