Papers › Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in image descriptions

Cross-linguistic differences and similarities in image descriptions

6 Jul 2017WS 2017 9arXiv:1707.01736archive 2025-07-28

Emiel van Miltenburg, Desmond Elliott, Piek Vossen

Automatic image description systems are commonly trained and evaluated on large image description datasets. Recently, researchers have started to collect such datasets for languages other than English. An unexplored question is how different these datasets are from English and, if there are any differences, what causes them to differ. This paper provides a cross-linguistic comparison of Dutch, English, and German image descriptions. We find that these descriptions are similar in many respects, but the familiarity of crowd workers with the subjects of the images has a noticeable influence on description specificity.

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