Automatically generating a natural language description of an image has attracted interests recently both because of its importance in practical applications and because it connects two major artificial intelligence fields: computer vision and natural language processing. Existing approaches are either top-down, which start from a gist of an image and convert it into words, or bottom-up, which come up with words describing various aspects of an image and then combine them. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that combines both approaches through a model of semantic attention. Our algorithm learns to selectively attend to semantic concept proposals and fuse them into hidden states and outputs of recurrent neural networks. The selection and fusion form a feedback connecting the top-down and bottom-up computation. We evaluate our algorithm on two public benchmarks: Microsoft COCO and Flickr30K. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches consistently across different evaluation metrics.

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Sentiment analysis of online user generated content is important for many social media analytics tasks. Researchers have largely relied on textual sentiment analysis to develop systems to predict political elections, measure economic indicators, and so on. Recently, social media users are increasingly using images and videos to express their opinions and share their experiences. Sentiment analysis of such large scale visual content can help better extract user sentiments toward events or topics, such as those in image tweets, so that prediction of sentiment from visual content is complementary to textual sentiment analysis. Motivated by the needs in leveraging large scale yet noisy training data to solve the extremely challenging problem of image sentiment analysis, we employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We first design a suitable CNN architecture for image sentiment analysis. We obtain half a million training samples by using a baseline sentiment algorithm to label Flickr images. To make use of such noisy machine labeled data, we employ a progressive strategy to fine-tune the deep network. Furthermore, we improve the performance on Twitter images by inducing domain transfer with a small number of manually labeled Twitter images. We have conducted extensive experiments on manually labeled Twitter images. The results show that the proposed CNN can achieve better performance in image sentiment analysis than competing algorithms.

Sentiment analysis on large-scale social media data is important to bridge the gaps between social media contents and real world activities including political election prediction, individual and public emotional status monitoring and analysis, and so on. Although textual sentiment analysis has been well studied based on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, analysis of the role of extensive emoji uses in sentiment analysis remains light. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for Twitter sentiment analysis with extra attention on emojis. We first learn bi-sense emoji embeddings under positive and negative sentimental tweets individually, and then train a sentiment classifier by attending on these bi-sense emoji embeddings with an attention-based long short-term memory network (LSTM). Our experiments show that the bi-sense embedding is effective for extracting sentiment-aware embeddings of emojis and outperforms the state-of-the-art models. We also visualize the attentions to show that the bi-sense emoji embedding provides better guidance on the attention mechanism to obtain a more robust understanding of the semantics and sentiments.

Generating stylized captions for an image is an emerging topic in image captioning. Given an image as input, it requires the system to generate a caption that has a specific style (e.g., humorous, romantic, positive, and negative) while describing the image content semantically accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel stylized image captioning model that effectively takes both requirements into consideration. To this end, we first devise a new variant of LSTM, named style-factual LSTM, as the building block of our model. It uses two groups of matrices to capture the factual and stylized knowledge, respectively, and automatically learns the word-level weights of the two groups based on previous context. In addition, when we train the model to capture stylized elements, we propose an adaptive learning approach based on a reference factual model, it provides factual knowledge to the model as the model learns from stylized caption labels, and can adaptively compute how much information to supply at each time step. We evaluate our model on two stylized image captioning datasets, which contain humorous/romantic captions and positive/negative captions, respectively. Experiments shows that our proposed model outperforms the state-ofthe-art approaches, without using extra ground truth supervision.