Jointly Modeling Embedding and Translation to Bridge Video and Language

Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental challenge of computer vision. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which models sequence dynamics, has attracted increasing attention on visual interpretation. However, most existing approaches generate a word locally with the given previous words and the visual content, while the relationship between sentence semantics and visual content is not holistically exploited. As a result, the generated sentences may be contextually correct but the semantics (e.g., subjects, verbs or objects) are not true.

This paper presents a novel unified framework, named Long Short-Term Memory with visual-semantic Embedding (LSTM-E), which can simultaneously explore the learning of LSTM and visual-semantic embedding. The former aims to locally maximize the probability of generating the next word given previous words and visual content, while the latter is to create a visual-semantic embedding space for enforcing the relationship between the semantics of the entire sentence and visual content. The experiments on YouTube2Text dataset show that our proposed LSTM-E achieves to-date the best published performance in generating natural sentences: 45.3% and 31.0% in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. Superior performances are also reported on two movie description datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD). In addition, we demonstrate that LSTM-E outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in predicting Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets.