Generating image captions with external encyclopedic knowledge

Abstract

Accurately reporting what objects are depicted in an image is largely a solved problem in automatic caption generation. The next big challenge on the way to truly humanlike captioning is being able to incorporate the context of the image and related real world knowledge. We tackle this challenge by creating an end-to-end caption generation system that makes extensive use of image-specific encyclopedic data. Our approach includes a novel way of using image location to identify relevant open-domain facts in an external knowledge base, with their subsequent integration into the captioning pipeline at both the encoding and decoding stages. Our system is trained and tested on a new dataset with naturally produced knowledge-rich captions, and achieves significant improvements over multiple baselines. We empirically demonstrate that our approach is effective for generating contextualized captions with encyclopedic knowledge that is both factually accurate and relevant to the image.