The dominant paradigm in modern natural language understanding is learning statistical language models from text-only corpora. This approach is founded on a distributional notion of semantics, i.e. that the "meaning" of a word is based only on its relationship to other words. While effective for many applications, methods in this family suffer from limited semantic understanding, as they miss learning from the multimodal and interactive environment in which communication often takes place - the symbols of l
On the other hand, humans acquire language by communicating about and interacting within a rich, perceptual environment. This behavior provides the necessary grounding for symbols, i.e. to concrete objects or concepts (i.e. physical or psychological). Thus, recent work has aimed to bridge vision, interactive learning, and natural language understanding through language learning tasks based on natural images (ReferIt [1], GuessWhat?! [2], Visual Question Answering [3,4,5,6], Visual Dialog [7], Captioning [8]
While machine learning research exploring visually-grounded language learning may be in its earlier stages, it may be possible to draw insights from the rich research literature on human language acquisition. In neuroscience, recent progress in fMRI technology has enabled to better understand the interleave between language, vision and other modalities [15,16] suggesting that the brains shares neural representation of concepts across vision and language. Differently, developmental cognitive scientists have
Peter Anderson