Zi Long

ZhenHao Tang, XiaoBing Zhang, Zi Long et al.

Recently, numbers of works shows that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) can be improved to a certain extent with using visual information. However, most of these conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experimental results based on a limited set of bilingual sentence-image pairs, such as Multi30K. In these kinds of datasets, the content of one bilingual parallel sentence pair must be well represented by a manually annotated image, which is different with the actual translation situation. Some previous works are proposed to addressed the problem by retrieving images from exiting sentence-image pairs with topic model. However, because of the limited collection of sentence-image pairs they used, their image retrieval method is difficult to deal with the out-of-vocabulary words, and can hardly prove that visual information enhance NMT rather than the co-occurrence of images and sentences. In this paper, we propose an open-vocabulary image retrieval methods to collect descriptive images for bilingual parallel corpus using image search engine. Next, we propose text-aware attentive visual encoder to filter incorrectly collected noise images. Experiment results on Multi30K and other two translation datasets show that our proposed method achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

Jinze Lv, Jian Chen, Zi Long et al.

Most existing multimodal machine translation (MMT) datasets are predominantly composed of static images or short video clips, lacking extensive video data across diverse domains and topics. As a result, they fail to meet the demands of real-world MMT tasks, such as documentary translation. In this study, we developed TopicVD, a topic-based dataset for video-supported multimodal machine translation of documentaries, aiming to advance research in this field. We collected video-subtitle pairs from documentaries and categorized them into eight topics, such as economy and nature, to facilitate research on domain adaptation in video-guided MMT. Additionally, we preserved their contextual information to support research on leveraging the global context of documentaries in video-guided MMT. To better capture the shared semantics between text and video, we propose an MMT model based on a cross-modal bidirectional attention module. Extensive experiments on the TopicVD dataset demonstrate that visual information consistently improves the performance of the NMT model in documentary translation. However, the MMT model's performance significantly declines in out-of-domain scenarios, highlighting the need for effective domain adaptation methods. Additionally, experiments demonstrate that global context can effectively improve translation performance. % Dataset and our implementations are available at https://github.com/JinzeLv/TopicVD