Unsupervised Learning of Visual Sense Models for Polysemous Words

Polysemy is a problem for methods that exploit image search engines to build object category models. Existing unsupervised approaches do not take word sense into consideration. We propose a new method that uses a dictionary to learn models of visual word sense from a large collection of unlabeled web data. The use of LDA to discover a latent sense space makes the model robust despite the very limited nature of dictionary definitions. The definitions are used to learn a distribution in the latent space that best represents a sense.