Models of Semantic Representation with Visual Attributes

Carina Silberer, Vittorio Ferrari, Mirella Lapata

Abstract: We consider the problem of grounding the meaning of words in the physical world and focus on the visual modality which we represent by visual attributes. We create a new large-scale taxonomy of visual attributes covering more than 500 concepts and their corresponding 688K images. We use this dataset to train attribute classifiers and integrate their predictions with text-based distributional models of word meaning. We show that these bimodal models give a better fit to human word association data compared to amodal models and word representations based on handcrafted norming data.