Violet: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Image Captioning with Gemini Decoder

Abdelrahman Mohamed, Fakhraddin Alwajih, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Alcides Inciarte, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
Although image captioning has a vast array of applications, it has not reached its full potential in languages other than English. Arabic, for instance, although the native language of more than 400 million people, remains largely underrepresented in this area. This is due to the lack of labeled data and powerful Arabic generative models. We alleviate this issue by presenting a novel vision-language model dedicated to Arabic, dubbed Violet. Our model is based on a vision encoder and a Gemini text decoder that maintains generation fluency while allowing fusion between the vision and language components. To train our model, we introduce a new method for automatically acquiring data from available English datasets. We also manually prepare a new dataset for evaluation. Violet performs sizeably better than our baselines on all of our evaluation datasets. For example, it reaches a CIDEr score of 61.2 on our manually annotated dataset and achieves an improvement of 13 points on Flickr8k.
Anthology ID:
2023.arabicnlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore (Hybrid)
Editors:
Hassan Sawaf, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Walid Magdy, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Amr Keleg, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Khalil Mrini, Rawan Almatham
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–11
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdelrahman Mohamed, Fakhraddin Alwajih, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Alcides Inciarte, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2023. Violet: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Image Captioning with Gemini Decoder. In Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023, pages 1–11, Singapore (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Violet: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Image Captioning with Gemini Decoder (Mohamed et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.1.pdf