Crossmodal Network-Based Distributional Semantic Models

Despite the recent success of distributional semantic models (DSMs) in various semantic tasks they remain disconnected with real-world perceptual cues since they typically rely on linguistic features. Text data constitute the dominant source of features for the majority of such models, although there is evidence from cognitive science that cues from other modalities contribute to the acquisition and representation of semantic knowledge. In this work, we propose the crossmodal extension of a two-tier text-based model, where semantic representations are encoded in the first layer, while the second layer is used for computing similarity between words. We exploit text- and image-derived features for performing computations at each layer, as well as various approaches for their crossmodal fusion. It is shown that the crossmodal model performs better (from 0.68 to 0.71 correlation coefficient) than the unimodal one for the task of similarity computation between words.