Transforming recorded videos into concise and accurate textual summaries is a growing challenge in multimodal learning. This paper introduces VISTA, a dataset specifically designed for video-to-text summarization in scientific domains. VISTA contains 18,599 recorded AI conference presentations paired with their corresponding paper abstracts. We benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art large models and apply a plan-based framework to better capture the structured nature of abstracts. Both human and automated evaluations confirm that explicit planning enhances summary quality and factual consistency. However, a considerable gap remains between models and human performance, highlighting the challenges of our dataset. This study aims to pave the way for future research on scientific video-to-text summarization.

This work reimplements a recent semantic bootstrapping child language acquisition (CLA) model, which was originally designed for English, and trains it to learn a new language: Hebrew. The model learns from pairs of utterances and logical forms as meaning representations, and acquires both syntax and word meanings simultaneously. The results show that the model mostly transfers to Hebrew, but that a number of factors, including the richer morphology in Hebrew, makes the learning slower and less robust. This suggests that a clear direction for future work is to enable the model to leverage the similarities between different word forms.

Online deep clustering refers to the joint use of a feature extraction network and a clustering model to assign cluster labels to each new data point or batch as it is processed. While faster and more versatile than offline methods, online clustering can easily reach the collapsed solution where the encoder maps all inputs to the same point and all are put into a single cluster. Successful existing models have employed various techniques to avoid this problem, most of which require data augmentation or which aim to make the average soft assignment across the dataset the same for each cluster. We propose a method that does not require data augmentation, and that, differently from existing methods, regularizes the hard assignments. Using a Bayesian framework, we derive an intuitive optimization objective that can be straightforwardly included in the training of the encoder network. Tested on four image datasets, it consistently avoids collapse more robustly than other methods and leads to more accurate clustering. We also conduct further experiments and analyses justifying our choice to regularize the hard cluster assignments. Code is available at https://github.com/Lou1sM/online_hard_clustering.

In this paper we address the task of summarizing television shows, which touches key areas in AI research: complex reasoning, multiple modalities, and long narratives.We present a modular approach where separate components perform specialized sub-tasks which we argue affords greater flexibility compared to end-toend methods.Our modules involve detecting scene boundaries, reordering scenes so as to minimize the number of cuts between different events, converting visual information to text, summarizing the dialogue in each scene, and fusing the scene summaries into a final summary for the entire episode.We also present a new metric, PRISMA (Precision and Recall Evaluation of Summary Facts), to measure both precision and recall of generated summaries, which we decompose into atomic facts.Tested on the recently released SummScreen3D dataset (Papalampidi and Lapata, 2023), our method produces higher quality summaries than comparison models, as measured with ROUGE and our new fact-based metric.

We present a new image complexity metric. Existing complexity metrics cannot distinguish meaningful content from noise, and give a high score to white noise images, which contain no meaningful information. We use the minimum description length principle to determine the number of clusters and designate certain points as outliers and, hence, correctly assign white noise a low score. The presented method is a step towards humans’ ability to detect when data contain a meaningful pattern. It also has similarities to theoretical ideas for measuring meaningful complexity. We conduct experiments on seven different sets of images, which show that our method assigns the most accurate scores to all images considered. Additionally, comparing the different levels of the hierarchy of clusters can reveal how complexity manifests at different scales, from local detail to global structure. We then present ablation studies showing the contribution of the components of our method, and that it continues to assign reasonable scores when the inputs are modified in certain ways, including the addition of Gaussian noise and the lowering of the resolution.

Nearly all existing techniques for automated video annotation (or captioning) describe videos using natural language sentences. However, this has several shortcomings: (i) it is very hard to then further use the generated natural language annotations in automated data processing, (ii) generating natural language annotations requires solving the hard subtask of generating semantically precise and syntactically correct natural language sentences, which is actually unrelated to the task of video annotation, (iii) it is difficult to quantitatively measure performance, as standard metrics (e.g., accuracy and F1-score) are inapplicable, and (iv) annotations are language-specific. In this paper, we propose the new task of knowledge graph extraction from videos, i.e., producing a description in the form of a knowledge graph of the contents of a given video. Since no datasets exist for this task, we also include a method to automatically generate them, starting from datasets where videos are annotated with natural language. We then describe an initial deep-learning model for knowledge graph extraction from videos, and report results on MSVD* and MSR-VTT*, two datasets obtained from MSVD and MSR-VTT using our method.

We present a system for linking dictionaries at the sense level, which is part of a wider programme aiming to extend current lexical resources and to create new ones by automatic means. One of the main challenges of the sense linking task is the existence of non one-to-one mappings among senses. Our system handles this issue by addressing the task as a binary classification problem using standard Machine Learning methods, where each sense pair is classified independently from the others. In addition, it implements a second, statistically-based classification layer to also model the dependence existing among sense pairs, namely, the fact that a sense in one dictionary that is already linked to a sense in the other dictionary has a lower probability of being linked to a further sense. The resulting double-layer classifier achieves global Precision and Recall scores of 0.91 and 0.80, respectively.