Visual Named Entity Linking: A New Dataset and A Baseline

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dataset and baseline methods for purely visual named entity linking in images, focusing on linking image regions to entities in knowledge bases without relying on textual data.

Contribution

It proposes a new VNEL task with three sub-tasks, introduces the WIKIPerson dataset, and establishes baseline algorithms for visual entity linking.

Findings

High-quality human-annotated dataset created

Baseline algorithms demonstrate effectiveness

Experiments verify dataset and method quality

Abstract

Visual Entity Linking (VEL) is a task to link regions of images with their corresponding entities in Knowledge Bases (KBs), which is beneficial for many computer vision tasks such as image retrieval, image caption, and visual question answering. While existing tasks in VEL either rely on textual data to complement a multi-modal linking or only link objects with general entities, which fails to perform named entity linking on large amounts of image data. In this paper, we consider a purely Visual-based Named Entity Linking (VNEL) task, where the input only consists of an image. The task is to identify objects of interest (i.e., visual entity mentions) in images and link them to corresponding named entities in KBs. Since each entity often contains rich visual and textual information in KBs, we thus propose three different sub-tasks, i.e., visual to visual entity linking (V2VEL), visual to textual entity linking (V2TEL), and visual to visual-textual entity linking (V2VTEL). In addition, we present a high-quality human-annotated visual person linking dataset, named WIKIPerson. Based on WIKIPerson, we establish a series of baseline algorithms for the solution of each sub-task, and conduct experiments to verify the quality of proposed datasets and the effectiveness of baseline methods. We envision this work to be helpful for soliciting more works regarding VNEL in the future. The codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ict-bigdatalab/VNEL.