The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data. But exactly how such data can be harnessed and organized remains a critical problem. We introduce here a new database called “ImageNet”, a large-scale ontology of images built upon the backbone of the WordNet structure. ImageNet aims to populate the majority of the 80,000 synsets of WordNet with an average of 500-1000 clean and full resolution images. This will result in tens of millions of annotated images organized by the semantic hierarchy of WordNet. This paper offers a detailed analysis of ImageNet in its current state: 12 subtrees with 5247 synsets and 3.2 million images in total. We show that ImageNet is much larger in scale and diversity and much more accurate than the current image datasets. Constructing such a large-scale database is a challenging task. We describe the data collection scheme with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Lastly, we illustrate the usefulness of ImageNet through three simple applications in object recognition, image classification and automatic object clustering. We hope that the scale, accuracy, diversity and hierarchical structure of ImageNet can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the computer vision community and beyond.

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ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database

We present a new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding. This is achieved by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context. Objects are labeled using per-instance segmentations to aid in precise object localization. Our dataset contains photos of 91 objects types that would be easily recognizable by a 4 year old. With a total of 2.5 million labeled instances in 328k images, the creation of our dataset drew upon extensive crowd worker involvement via novel user interfaces for category detection, instance spotting and instance segmentation. We present a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset in comparison to PASCAL, ImageNet, and SUN. Finally, we provide baseline performance analysis for bounding box and segmentation detection results using a Deformable Parts Model.

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Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context

The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) challenge is a benchmark in visual object category recognition and detection, providing the vision and machine learning communities with a standard dataset of images and annotation, and standard evaluation procedures. Organised annually from 2005 to present, the challenge and its associated dataset has become accepted as the benchmark for object detection.

This paper describes the dataset and evaluation procedure. We review the state-of-the-art in evaluated methods for both classification and detection, analyse whether the methods are statistically different, what they are learning from the images (e.g. the object or its context), and what the methods find easy or confuse. The paper concludes with lessons learnt in the three year history of the challenge, and proposes directions for future improvement and extension.

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The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) Challenge

An important part of our information-gathering behavior has always been to find out what other people think. With the growing availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs, new opportunities and challenges arise as people now can, and do, actively use information technologies to seek out and understand the opinions of others. The sudden eruption of activity in the area of opinion mining and sentiment analysis, which deals with the computational treatment of opinion, sentiment, and subjectivity in text, has thus occurred at least in part as a direct response to the surge of interest in new systems that deal directly with opinions as a first-class object.

This survey covers techniques and approaches that promise to directly enable opinion-oriented information-seeking systems. Our focus is on methods that seek to address the new challenges raised by sentiment-aware applications, as compared to those that are already present in more traditional fact-based analysis. We include material on summarization of evaluative text and on broader issues regarding privacy, manipulation, and economic impact that the development of opinion-oriented information-access services gives rise to. To facilitate future work, a discussion of available resources, benchmark datasets, and evaluation campaigns is also provided.

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Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

Merchants selling products on the Web often ask their customers to review the products that they have purchased and the associated services. As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This makes it difficult for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. It also makes it difficult for the manufacturer of the product to keep track and to manage customer opinions. For the manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell the same product and the manufacturer normally produces many kinds of products. In this research, we aim to mine and to summarize all the customer reviews of a product. This summarization task is different from traditional text summarization because we only mine the features of the product on which the customers have expressed their opinions and whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting a subset or rewrite some of the original sentences from the reviews to capture the main points as in the classic text summarization. Our task is performed in three steps: (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. This paper proposes several novel techniques to perform these tasks. Our experimental results using reviews of a number of products sold online demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques.

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Mining and summarizing customer reviews

Part 1 The lexical database: nouns in WordNet, George A. Miller modifiers in WordNet, Katherine J. Miller a semantic network of English verbs, Christiane Fellbaum design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and searching software, Randee I. Tengi. Part 2: automated discovery of WordNet relations, Marti A. Hearst representing verb alterations in WordNet, Karen T. Kohl et al the formalization of WordNet by methods of relational concept analysis, Uta E. Priss. Part 3 Applications of WordNet: building semantic concordances, Shari Landes et al performance and confidence in a semantic annotation task, Christiane Fellbaum et al WordNet and class-based probabilities, Philip Resnik combining local context and WordNet similarity for word sense identification, Claudia Leacock and Martin Chodorow using WordNet for text retrieval, Ellen M. Voorhees lexical chains as representations of context for the detection and correction of malapropisms, Graeme Hirst and David St-Onge temporal indexing through lexical chaining, Reem Al-Halimi and Rick Kazman COLOR-X - using knowledge from WordNet for conceptual modelling, J.F.M. Burg and R.P. van de Riet knowledge processing on an extended WordNet, Sanda M. Harabagiu and Dan I Moldovan appendix - obtaining and using WordNet.

WordNet : an electronic lexical database

The Generative Lexicon

Pre-trained language models encode undesirable social biases, which are further exacerbated in downstream use. To this end, we propose MABEL (a Method for Attenuating Gender Bias using Entailment Labels), an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representations. Key to our approach is the use of a contrastive learning objective on counterfactually augmented, gender-balanced entailment pairs from natural language inference (NLI) datasets. We also introduce an alignment regularizer that pulls identical entailment pairs along opposite gender directions closer. We extensively evaluate our approach on intrinsic and extrinsic metrics, and show that MABEL outperforms previous task-agnostic debiasing approaches in terms of fairness. It also preserves task performance after fine-tuning on downstream tasks. Together, these findings demonstrate the suitability of NLI data as an effective means of bias mitigation, as opposed to only using unlabeled sentences in the literature. Finally, we identify that existing approaches often use evaluation settings that are insufficient or inconsistent. We make an effort to reproduce and compare previous methods, and call for unifying the evaluation settings across gender debiasing methods for better future comparison.

MABEL: Attenuating Gender Bias using Textual Entailment Data

Machine translation and other NLP systems 001 often contain significant biases regarding sen- 002 sitive attributes, such as gender or race, that 003 worsen system performance and perpetuate 004 harmful stereotypes. Recent preliminary re- 005 search suggests that adversarial learning can be 006 used as part of a model-agnostic bias mitiga- 007 tion method that requires no data modifications. 008 However, adapting this strategy for machine 009 translation and other modern NLP domains re- 010 quires (1) restructuring training objectives in 011 the context of fine-tuning pretrained large lan- 012 guage models and (2) developing measures for 013 gender or other protected variables for tasks in 014 which these attributes must be deduced from 015 the data itself. 016 We present an adversarial learning framework 017 that addresses these challenges to mitigate gen- 018 der bias in seq2seq machine translation. Our 019 framework improves the disparity in translation 020 quality for sentences with male vs. female enti- 021 ties by 86% for English-German translation and 022 91% for English-French translation, with min- 023 imal effect on translation quality. The results 024 suggest that adversarial learning is a promising 025 technique for mitigating gender bias in machine 026 translation. 027

Christiane Fellbaum

Papers

WordNet : an electronic lexical database

The Generative Lexicon

MABEL: Attenuating Gender Bias using Textual Entailment Data

Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation through Adversarial Learning

Computational Approaches for Understanding Semantic Constraints on Two-termed Coordination Structures