Title: Learning Convolutional Text Representations for Visual Question Answering,
Abstract: Visual question answering is a recently proposed artificial intelligence task
that requires a deep understanding of both images and texts. In deep learning,
images are typically modeled through convolutional neural networks, and texts
are typically modeled through recurrent neural networks. While the requirement
for modeling images is similar to traditional computer vision tasks, such as
object recognition and image classification, visual question answering raises a
different need for textual representation as compared to other natural language
processing tasks. In this work, we perform a detailed analysis on natural
language questions in visual question answering. Based on the analysis, we
propose to rely on convolutional neural networks for learning textual
representations. By exploring the various properties of convolutional neural
networks specialized for text data, such as width and depth, we present our
"CNN Inception + Gate" model. We show that our model improves question
representations and thus the overall accuracy of visual question answering
models. We also show that the text representation requirement in visual
question answering is more complicated and comprehensive than that in
conventional natural language processing tasks, making it a better task to
evaluate textual representation methods. Shallow models like fastText, which
can obtain comparable results with deep learning models in tasks like text
classification, are not suitable in visual question answering.