SentiCap: Generating Image Descriptions with Sentiments

The recent progress on image recognition and language modeling is making automatic description of image content a reality. However, stylized, non-factual aspects of the written description are missing from the current systems. One such style is descriptions with emotions, which is commonplace in everyday communication, and influences decision-making and interpersonal relationships. We design a system to describe an image with emotions, and present a model that automatically generates captions with positive or negative sentiments. We propose a novel switching recurrent neural network with word-level regularization, which is able to produce emotional image captions using only 2000+ training sentences containing sentiments. We evaluate the captions with different automatic and crowd-sourcing metrics. Our model compares favourably in common quality metrics for image captioning. In 84. 6% of cases the generated positive captions were judged as being at least as descriptive as the factual captions. Of these positive captions 88% were con- firmed by the crowd-sourced workers as having the appropriate sentiment.

Authors

• Alexander Mathews
• Lexing Xie
• Xuming He ShanghaiTech University Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging

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