Generative Model of Suitable Meme Sentences for Images Using AutoEncoder

This paper proposes a new image caption generative model for Memes called GUMI-AE. Meme denotes a humorous short sentence suitable for the given image in this paper. An Image caption generative model usually consists of an image encoder and a sentence decoder. Furthermore, most conventional models use a pre-trained neural network model for the image encoder, e.g., ResNet152 trained using ImageNet. However, pre-trained ResNet152 may not be effective as an encoder for extracting features from arbitrary images. Because the training samples for the meme generative model can be obtained from the website “Bokete” (in Japanese) which is a website that provides a system for people to post images and humorous short sentences associated with these images. Images posted on Bokete include a wide variety of images such as illustrations and text-only images which may be outside of the training images of ImageNet. This paper proposes an image caption generative model incorporating AutoEncoder (AE) as the image encoder. AE can be trained with the training samples obtained from Bokete without the image annotation. This enables the proposed method to generate short sentences with humor for memes. Finally, the proposed model is compared with the conventional one, and the evaluation of the proposed GUMI-AE will be discussed.