Imageability Estimation using Visual and Language Features

Imageability is a concept from Psycholinguistics quantizing the human perception of words. However, existing datasets are created through subjective experiments and are thus very small. Therefore, methods to automatically estimate the imageability can be helpful. For an accurate automatic imageability estimation, we extend the idea of a psychological hypothesis called Dual-Coding Theory, that discusses the connection of our perception towards visual information and language information, and also focus on the relationship between the pronunciation of a word and its imageability. In this research, we propose a method to estimate imageability of words using both visual and language features extracted from corresponding data. For the estimation, we use visual features extracted from low- and high-level image features, and language features extracted from textual features and phonetic features of words. Evaluations show that our proposed method can estimate imageability more accurately than comparative methods, implying the contribution of each feature to the imageability.