Visual representation of negation: Real world data analysis on comic image design

There has been a widely held view that visual representations (e.g., photographs and illustrations) do not depict negation, for example, one that can be expressed by a sentence “the train is not coming”. This view is empirically challenged by analyzing the real-world visual representations of comic (manga) illustrations. In the experiment using image captioning tasks, we gave people comic illustrations and asked them to explain what they could read from them. The collected data showed that some comic illustrations could depict negation without any aid of sequences (multiple panels) or conventional devices (special symbols). This type of comic illustrations was subjected to further experiments, classifying images into those containing negation and those not containing negation. While this image classification was easy for humans, it was difficult for data-driven machines, i.e., deep learning models (CNN), to achieve the same high performance. Given the findings, we argue that some comic illustrations evoke background knowledge and thus can depict negation with purely visual elements.