Table-to-text generation has been widely studied in the Natural Language Processing community in the recent years. We give a new perspective to this problem by incorporating signals from both tables as well as associated images to generate relevant text. While tables contain a structured list of facts, images are a rich source of unstructured visual information. For example, in the tourism domain, images can be used to infer knowledge such as the type of landmark (e.g., church), its architecture (e.g., Ancient Roman), and composition (e.g., white marble). Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the novel task of Vision-augmented Table-To-Text Generation (VisToT, defined as follows: given a table and an associated image, produce a descriptive sentence conditioned on the multimodal input. For the task, we present a novel multimodal table-to-text dataset, WikiLandmarks, covering 73,084 unique world landmarks. Further, we also present a competitive architecture, namely, VT3 that generates accurate sentences conditioned on the image and table pairs. Through extensive analyses and experiments, we show that visual cues from images are helpful in (i) inferring missing information from incomplete or sparse tables, and (ii) strengthening the importance of useful information from noisy tables for natural language generation. We make the code and data publicly available.

VisToT: Vision-Augmented Table-to-Text Generation

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries -- (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii)Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce – namely COFAR.

Prajwal Gatti

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