Tell as You Imagine: Sentence Imageability-Aware Image Captioning.

Image captioning as a multimedia task is advancing in terms of performance in generating captions for general purposes. However, it remains difficult to tailor generated captions to different applications. In this paper, we propose a sentence imageability-aware image captioning method to generate captions tailoring to various applications. Sentence imageability describes how easily the caption can be mentally imagined. This concept is applied to the captioning model to obtain a better understanding of the perception of a generated caption. First, we extend an existing image caption dataset by augmenting its captions’ diversity. Then, a sentence imageability score for each augmented caption is calculated. A modified image captioning model is trained using this extended dataset to generate captions tailoring to a specified imageability score. Experiments showed promising results in generating imageability-aware captions. Especially, results from a subjective experiment showed that the perception of the generated captions correlates with the specified score.