Generating captions without looking beyond objects

Hendrik Heuer, Christof Monz, Arnold W. M. Smeulders

Abstract: This paper explores new evaluation perspectives for image captioning and introduces a noun translation task that achieves comparative image caption generation performance by translating from a set of nouns to captions. This implies that in image captioning, all word categories other than nouns can be evoked by a powerful language model without sacrificing performance on n-gram precision. The paper also investigates lower and upper bounds of how much individual word categories in the captions contribute to the final BLEU score. A large possible improvement exists for nouns, verbs, and prepositions.