English

SentiCap: Generating Image Descriptions with Sentiments

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2015-12-15 v2 Computation and Language

Abstract

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 confirmed by the crowd-sourced workers as having the appropriate sentiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.01431,
  title  = {SentiCap: Generating Image Descriptions with Sentiments},
  author = {Alexander Mathews and Lexing Xie and Xuming He},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.01431},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:13:31.679Z