Grounded PCFG Induction with Images

Lifeng Jin and William Schuler
The Ohio State University


Abstract

Recent work in unsupervised parsing has tried to incorporate visual information into learning, but results suggest that these models need linguistic bias to compete against models that only rely on text. This work proposes grammar induction models which use visual information from images for labeled parsing, and achieve state-of-the-art results on grounded grammar induction on several languages. Results indicate that visual information is especially helpful in languages where high frequency words are more broadly distributed. Comparison between models with and without visual information shows that the grounded models are able to use visual information for proposing noun phrases, gathering useful information from images for unknown words, and achieving better performance at prepositional phrase attachment prediction.