“Show me the cup”: reference with continuous representations

Boleda, Gemma; Baroni, Marco; Padó, Sebastian

“Show me the cup”: reference with continuous representations

Citation

Baroni M, Boleda G, Padó S. “Show me the cup”: reference with continuous representations. In: Gelbukh A, editor. Computational linguistics and intelligent text processing: 18th International Conference, CICLing 2017 revised selected papers, part 1; 2017 Apr 17-23; Budapest, Hungary. Cham: Springer; 2018. p. 209-24.

Abstract

One of the most basic functions of language is to refer to objects in a shared scene. Modeling reference with continuous representations is challenging because it requires individuation, i.e., tracking and distinguishing an arbitrary number of referents. We introduce a neural network model that, given a de nite description and a set of objects represented by natural images, points to the intended object if the expression has a unique referent, or indicates a failure, if it does not. The model, directly trained on reference acts, is competitive with a pipeline manually engineered to perform the same task, both when referents are purely visual, and when they are characterized by a combination of visual and linguistic properties.