Learning Abstract Concept Embeddings from Multi-Modal Data: Since You Probably Can't See What I Mean

Models that acquire semantic representations from both linguistic and perceptual input are of interest to researchers in NLP because of the obvious parallels with human language learning. Performance advantages of the multi-modal approach over language-only models have been clearly established when models are required to learn concrete noun concepts. However, such concepts are comparatively rare in everyday language. In this work, we present a new means of extending the scope of multi-modal models to more commonly-occurring abstract lexical concepts via an approach that learns multimodal embeddings. Our architecture outperforms previous approaches in combining input from distinct modalities, and propagates perceptual information on concrete concepts to abstract concepts more effectively than alternatives. We discuss the implications of our results both for optimizing the performance of multi-modal models and for theories of abstract conceptual representation.