Multimodal Attribute Extraction

The broad goal of information extraction is to derive structured information from unstructured data. However, most existing methods focus solely on text, ignoring other types of unstructured data such as images, video and audio which comprise an increasing portion of the information on the web. To address this shortcoming, we propose the task of multimodal attribute extraction. Given a collection of unstructured and semi-structured contextual information about an entity (such as a textual description, or visual depictions) the task is to extract the entity's underlying attributes. In this paper, we provide a dataset containing mixed-media data for over 2 million product items along with 7 million attribute-value pairs describing the items which can be used to train attribute extractors in a weakly supervised manner. We provide a variety of baselines which demonstrate the relative effectiveness of the individual modes of information towards solving the task, as well as study human performance.