Distributional semantics of objects in visual scenes in comparison to text

Abstract

The distributional hypothesis states that the meaning of a concept is defined through the contexts it occurs in. In practice, often word co-occurrence and proximity are analyzed in text corpora for a given word to obtain a real-valued semantic word vector, which is taken to (at least partially) encode the meaning of this word. Here we transfer this idea from text to images, where pre-assigned labels of other objects or activations of convolutional neural networks serve as context. We propose a simple algorithm that extracts and processes object contexts from an image database and yields semantic vectors for objects. We show empirically that these representations exhibit on par performance with state-of-the-art distributional models over a set of conventional objects. For this we employ well-known word benchmarks in addition to a newly proposed object-centric benchmark.