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Social Image Tags as a Source of Word Embeddings: A Task-oriented Evaluation

Distributional hypothesis has been playing a central role in statistical NLP. Recently, however, its limitation in incorporating perceptual and empirical knowledge is noted, eliciting a field of perceptually grounded computational semantics. Typical sources of features in such a research are image datasets, where images are accompanied by linguistic tags and/or descriptions. Mainstream approaches employ machine learning techniques to integrate/combine visual features with linguistic features. In contrast to or supplementing these approaches, this study assesses the effectiveness of social image tags in generating word embeddings, and argues that these generated representations exhibit somewhat different and favorable behaviors from corpus-originated representations. More specifically, we generated word embeddings by using image tags obtained from a large social image dataset YFCC100M, which collects Flickr images and the associated tags. We evaluated the efficacy of generated word embeddings with standard semantic similarity/relatedness tasks, which showed that comparable performances with corpus-originated word embeddings were attained. These results further suggest that the generated embeddings could be effective in discriminating synonyms and antonyms, which has been an issue in distributional hypothesis-based approaches. In summary, social image tags can be utilized as yet another source of visually enforced features, provided the amount of available tags is large enough.