/cross-lingual-cap

Cross-lingual image captioning

MIT LicenseMIT

Cross-Lingual Image Captioning

Image captioning has so far been explored mostly in English, as most available datasets are in this language. However, the application of image captioning should not be restricted by language. The study of cross-lingual image captioning is essential for a large population on the planet who cannot speak English. We are developing novel algorithms that enable learning an image captioning model for a target language other than English, with minimal labeling effort.

cross-lingual image captioning

Code

Datasets

Flickr8k-cn Flickr30k-cn COCO-CN
train val test train val test train val test
Images 6,000 1,000 1,000 29,783 1,000 1,000 18,341 1,000 1,000
Human-annotated
Chinese sentences
30,000 5,000 5,000 -- -- -- 20,065 1,100 1,053
Machine-translated
Chinese sentences
30,000 5,000 -- 148,915 5,000 -- 91,758 5,004 5,001
Human-translated
Chinese sentences
-- -- 5,000 -- -- 5,000 -- -- 5,000

Performance table

Automated evaluation of five approaches to cross-lingual image captioning. Rejection sampling and weighted loss are comparable to Without fluency which learns from the full set of machine-translated sentences.

Flickr8k-cn Flickr30k-cn
BLEU-4 ROUGE CIDEr BLEU-4 ROUGE CIDEr
Late translation 17.3 39.3 33.7 15.3 38.5 27.1
Without fluency 24.1 45.9 47.6 17.8 40.8 32.5
Fluency-only 20.7 41.1 35.2 14.5 35.9 25.1
Rejection sampling 23.9 45.3 46.6 18.2 40.5 32.9
Weighted loss 24.0 45.0 46.3 18.3 40.2 33.0

Pre-trained Models

ruc_imcap: generate Chinese captions for novel images using one script

Publications

  1. Xirong Li, Chaoxi Xu, Xiaoxu Wang, Weiyu Lan, Zhengxiong Jia, Gang Yang, Jieping Xu, COCO-CN for Cross-Lingual Image Tagging, Captioning and Retrieval, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2019 (in press)
  2. 蓝玮毓, 王晓旭, 杨刚, 李锡荣, 标签增强的中文看图造句 (Improving Chinese Image Captioning by Tag Prediction), 计算机学报 (Chinese Journal of Computers), volume 42, number 1, pages 136-148, 2019
  3. Weiyu Lan, Xirong Li, Jianfeng Dong, Fluency-Guided Cross-Lingual Image Captioning, ACM MM 2017
  4. Qijie Wei, Xiaoxu Wang, Xirong Li, Harvesting Deep Models for Cross-Lingual Image Annotation, CBMI 2017
  5. Xirong Li, Weiyu Lan, Jianfeng Dong, Hailong Liu, Adding Chinese Captions to Images, ACM ICMR 2016

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61672523).