Modeling text with graph convolutional network for cross-modal information retrieval

Cross-modal information retrieval aims to find heterogeneous data of various modalities from a given query of one modality. The main challenge is to map different modalities into a common semantic space, in which distance between concepts in different modalities can be well modeled. For cross-modal information retrieval between images and texts, existing work mostly uses off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image feature extraction. For texts, word-level features such as bag-of-words or word2vec are employed to build deep learning models to represent texts. Besides word-level semantics, the semantic relations between words are also informative but less explored. In this paper, we model texts by graphs using similarity measure based on word2vec. A dual-path neural network model is proposed for couple feature learning in cross-modal information retrieval. One path utilizes Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for text modeling based on graph representations. The other path uses a neural network with layers of nonlinearities for image modeling based on off-the-shelf features. The model is trained by a pairwise similarity loss function to maximize the similarity of relevant text-image pairs and minimize the similarity of irrelevant pairs. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly, with 17% improvement on accuracy for the best case.