Multimodal Named Entity Recognition for Short Social Media Posts

Seungwhan Moon, Leonardo Neves, Vitor Carvalho


Abstract
We introduce a new task called Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for noisy user-generated data such as tweets or Snapchat captions, which comprise short text with accompanying images. These social media posts often come in inconsistent or incomplete syntax and lexical notations with very limited surrounding textual contexts, bringing significant challenges for NER. To this end, we create a new dataset for MNER called SnapCaptions (Snapchat image-caption pairs submitted to public and crowd-sourced stories with fully annotated named entities). We then build upon the state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM word/character based NER models with 1) a deep image network which incorporates relevant visual context to augment textual information, and 2) a generic modality-attention module which learns to attenuate irrelevant modalities while amplifying the most informative ones to extract contexts from, adaptive to each sample and token. The proposed MNER model with modality attention significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art text-only NER models by successfully leveraging provided visual contexts, opening up potential applications of MNER on myriads of social media platforms.
Anthology ID:
N18-1078
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
852–860
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1078
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1078
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seungwhan Moon, Leonardo Neves, and Vitor Carvalho. 2018. Multimodal Named Entity Recognition for Short Social Media Posts. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 852–860, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multimodal Named Entity Recognition for Short Social Media Posts (Moon et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1078.pdf