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Maria: A Visual Experience Powered Conversational Agent

Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Chongyang Tao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fan Liang, Daxin Jiang


Abstract
Arguably, the visual perception of conversational agents to the physical world is a key way for them to exhibit the human-like intelligence. Image-grounded conversation is thus proposed to address this challenge. Existing works focus on exploring the multimodal dialog models that ground the conversation on a given image. In this paper, we take a step further to study image-grounded conversation under a fully open-ended setting where no paired dialog and image are assumed available. Specifically, we present Maria, a neural conversation agent powered by the visual world experiences which are retrieved from a large-scale image index. Maria consists of three flexible components, i.e., text-to-image retriever, visual concept detector and visual-knowledge-grounded response generator. The retriever aims to retrieve a correlated image to the dialog from an image index, while the visual concept detector extracts rich visual knowledge from the image. Then, the response generator is grounded on the extracted visual knowledge and dialog context to generate the target response. Extensive experiments demonstrate Maria outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on automatic metrics and human evaluation, and can generate informative responses that have some visual commonsense of the physical world.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.435
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5596–5611
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.435
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.435
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Chongyang Tao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fan Liang, and Daxin Jiang. 2021. Maria: A Visual Experience Powered Conversational Agent. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5596–5611, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Maria: A Visual Experience Powered Conversational Agent (Liang et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.435.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.435.mp4
Code
 jokieleung/Maria
Data
MS COCOReddit Conversation CorpusVisual Genome