Our work on cross-lingual image tagging, captioning and retrieval has been published as a regular paper in the September issue of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (Impact factor: 5.452). Data and code are available at https://github.com/li-xirong/coco-cn.
This paper contributes to cross-lingual image annotation and retrieval in terms of data and baseline methods. We propose COCO-CN, a novel dataset enriching MS-COCO with manually written Chinese sentences and tags. For effective annotation acquisition, we develop a recommendation-assisted collective annotation system, automatically providing an annotator with several tags and sentences deemed to be relevant with respect to the pictorial content. Having 20 342 images annotated with 27 218 Chinese sentences and 70 993 tags, COCO-CN is currently the largest Chinese–English dataset that provides a unified and challenging platform for cross-lingual image tagging, captioning, and retrieval. We develop conceptually simple yet effective methods per task for learning from cross-lingual resources. Extensive experiments on the three tasks justify the viability of the proposed dataset and methods.