Universal Multimodal Representation for Language Understanding

Representation learning is the foundation of natural language processing (NLP). This work presents new methods to employ visual information as assistant signals to general NLP tasks. For each sentence, we first retrieve a flexible number of images either from a light topic-image lookup table extracted over the existing sentence-image pairs or a shared cross-modal embedding space that is pre-trained on out-of-shelf text-image pairs. Then, the text and images are encoded by a Transformer encoder and convolutional neural network, respectively. The two sequences of representations are further fused by an attention layer for the interaction of the two modalities. In this study, the retrieval process is controllable and flexible. The universal visual representation overcomes the lack of large-scale bilingual sentence-image pairs. Our method can be easily applied to text-only tasks without manually annotated multimodal parallel corpora. We apply the proposed method to a wide range of natural language generation and understanding tasks, including neural machine translation, natural language inference, and semantic similarity. Experimental results show that our method is generally effective for different tasks and languages. Analysis indicates that the visual signals enrich textual representations of content words, provide fine-grained grounding information about the relationship between concepts and events, and potentially conduce to disambiguation.