Visual Entity Linking via Multi-modal Learning postprint

Abstract: Existing visual scene understanding methods mainly focus on identifying coarse-grained concepts about the visual objects and their relationships, largely neglecting fine-grained scene understanding. In fact, many data-driven applications on the Web (e.g., news-reading and e-shopping) require accurate recognition of much less coarse concepts as entities and proper linking them to a knowledge graph (KG), which can take their performance to the next level. In light of this, in this paper, we identify a new research task: visual entity linking for fine-grained scene understanding. To accomplish the task, we first extract features of candidate entities from different modalities, i.e., visual features, textual features, and KG features. Then, we design a deep modal-attention neural network-based learning-to-rank method which aggregates all features and maps visual objects to the entities in KG. Extensive experimental results on the newly constructed dataset show that our proposed method is effective as it significantly improves the accuracy performance from 66.46% to 83.16% compared with baselines.