Generalizing Image Captions for Image-Text Parallel Corpus

The ever growing amount of web images and their associated texts offers new opportunities for integrative models bridging natural language processing and computer vision. However, the potential benefits of such data are yet to be fully realized due to the complexity and noise in the alignment between image content and text. We address this challenge with contributions in two folds: first, we introduce the new task of image caption generalization, formulated as visually-guided sentence compression, and present an efficient algorithm based on dynamic beam search with dependency-based constraints. Second, we release a new large-scale corpus with 1 million image-caption pairs achieving tighter content alignment between images and text. Evaluation results show the intrinsic quality of the generalized captions and the extrinsic utility of the new imagetext parallel corpus with respect to a concrete application of image caption transfer.