Microsoft COCO Caption Evaluation

Evaluation codes for MS COCO caption generation.

Requirements

• java 1.8.0
• python 2 or 3
  • gensim

Files

./

• cocoEvalCapDemo.py (demo script)

./annotation

• captions_val2014.json (MS COCO 2014 caption validation set)
• Visit MS COCO download page for more details.

./results

• captions_val2014_fakecap_results.json (an example of fake results for running demo)
• Visit MS COCO format page for more details.

./pycocoevalcap: The folder where all evaluation codes are stored.

• evals.py: The file includes COCOEavlCap class that can be used to evaluate results on COCO.
• tokenizer: Python wrapper of Stanford CoreNLP PTBTokenizer
• bleu: Bleu evalutation codes
• meteor: Meteor evaluation codes
• rouge: Rouge-L evaluation codes
• cider: CIDEr evaluation codes
• spice: SPICE evaluation codes
• wmd: Word Mover's Distance evaluation codes

Setup

• You will first need to download the Stanford CoreNLP 3.6.0 code and models for use by SPICE. To do this, run: bash get_stanford_models.sh
• Note: SPICE will try to create a cache of parsed sentences in ./pycocoevalcap/spice/cache/. This dramatically speeds up repeated evaluations. The cache directory can be moved by setting 'CACHE_DIR' in ./pycocoevalcap/spice. In the same file, caching can be turned off by removing the '-cache' argument to 'spice_cmd'.
• You will also need to download the Google News negative 300 word2vec model for use by WMD. To do this, run: bash get_google_word2vec_model.sh

AllSPICE

AllSPICE is a metric measuring both diversity and accuracy of a generated caption set. This is proposed in Analysis of diversity-accuracy tradeoff in image captioning.

See cocoEvalAllSPICEDemo.ipynb to learn how to use it.

You can also check out ruotianluo/self-critical.pytorch/eval_multi.py to see how it is used in practice and ruotianluo/SPICE to see what change was made to the original SPICE code to realize AllSPICE.

References

• Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server
• PTBTokenizer: We use the Stanford Tokenizer which is included in Stanford CoreNLP 3.4.1.
• BLEU: BLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation
• Meteor: Project page with related publications. We use the latest version (1.5) of the Code. Changes have been made to the source code to properly aggreate the statistics for the entire corpus.
• Rouge-L: ROUGE: A Package for Automatic Evaluation of Summaries
• CIDEr: CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation
• SPICE: SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation
• WMD: From word embeddings to document distances (original metric publication) and Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning (publication with metric adapted for caption generation)

Also,

• Stop words distributed by the NLTK Stopwords Corpus [nltk.corpus.stopwords.words('english')], which originate from [https://anoncvs.postgresql.org/cvsweb.cgi/pgsql/src/backend/snowball/stopwords/] and later augmented at [nltk/nltk_data#22], were extracted and put in a text file in pycocoevalcap/wmd/data to avoid requiring users to install NLTK.
• Special thanks to David Semedo [https://github.com/davidfsemedo/coco-caption] for writing a Python 3 compatible version of coco-caption first and which was used as a reference to help make this fork.

Developers

• Xinlei Chen (CMU)
• Hao Fang (University of Washington)
• Tsung-Yi Lin (Cornell)
• Ramakrishna Vedantam (Virgina Tech)

Acknowledgement

• David Chiang (University of Norte Dame)
• Michael Denkowski (CMU)
• Alexander Rush (Harvard University)
• Mert Kilickaya (Hacettepe University)