They Are Not All Alike: Answering Different Spatial Questions Requires Different Grounding Strategies

EMNLP (SpLU) 2020 · Alberto Testoni, Claudio Greco, Tobias Bianchi, Mauricio Mazuecos, Agata Marcante, Luciana Benotti, Raffaella Bernardi ·

In this paper, we study the grounding skills required to answer spatial questions asked by humans while playing the GuessWhat?! game. We propose a classification for spatial questions dividing them into absolute, relational, and group questions. We build a new answerer model based on the LXMERT multimodal transformer and we compare a baseline with and without visual features of the scene. We are interested in studying how the attention mechanisms of LXMERT are used to answer spatial questions since they require putting attention on more than one region simultaneously and spotting the relation holding among them. We show that our proposed model outperforms the baseline by a large extent (9.70% on spatial questions and 6.27% overall). By analyzing LXMERT errors and its attention mechanisms, we find that our classification helps to gain a better understanding of the skills required to answer different spatial questions.

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