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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>GQA-it: Italian Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Danilo Croce</string-name>
          <email>croce@info.uniroma2.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Lucia C. Passaro</string-name>
          <email>lucia.passaro@unipi.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Alessandro Lenci</string-name>
          <email>alessandro.lenci@unipi.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Roberto Basili</string-name>
          <email>basili@info.uniroma2.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pisa</institution>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Enterprise Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”</institution>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Dept. of Philology</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Literature and Linguistics</addr-line>
          ,
          <institution>University of Pisa</institution>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>The recent breakthroughs in the field of deep learning have lead to state-of-theart results in several Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Nevertheless, the training requirements in cross-linguistic settings are not completely satisfying at the moment. The datasets suitable for training VQA systems for nonEnglish languages are still not available, thus representing a significant barrier for most neural methods. This paper explores the possibility of acquiring in a semiautomatic fashion a large-scale dataset for VQA in Italian. It consists of more than 1 M question-answer pairs over 80k images, with a test set of 3,000 question-answer pairs manually validated. To the best of our knowledge, the models trained on this dataset represent the first attempt to approach VQA in Italian, with experimental results comparable with those obtained on the English original material.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1 Introduction</title>
      <p>Multimodal information processing is crucial to
deal with a wide array of human actions and
realworld computer applications. Notably, when
observing a real-world scene, agents – both human
and virtual ones – should understand what kinds
of objects it depicts and the relations occurring
among them. Such understanding allows agents to
reason about the scene and the context in which it
appears, thus inferring additional information that
can be used for different purposes.</p>
      <p>
        In recent years, several Artificial Intelligence
(AI) tasks have been proposed in order to
challenge systems in drawing inferences from
multimodal inputs bringing together both linguistic and
visual contents. An important task boosting
research in multimodal scenarios is represented by
Visual Question Answering
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref3">(Antol et al., 2015;
Srivastava et al., 2020)</xref>
        . This task consists of
correctly answering natural language questions
regarding an input image. This requires the
integration of vision, language and commonsense
knowledge to answer. In English, several
benchmark datasets have been proposed to deal with
visual reasoning and question answering
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref17 ref18 ref3 ref5">(Antol et
al., 2015; Hudson and Manning, 2019;
Srivastava et al., 2020)</xref>
        . However, despite the
impressive advances obtained in this context thanks to
both new available resources and models, other
languages still lack large-scale datasets suitable to
learn VQA models.
      </p>
      <p>
        In this paper, we present the semi-automatic
creation of GQA-it, a large-scale Italian dataset
based on the balanced version of GQA
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Hudson
and Manning, 2019)</xref>
        . Specifically, we obtained
more than 1 million question/answer pairs in
Italian over 80K images by applying Neural Machine
Translation (NMT) and we manually validated
3, 000 examples to provide a valuable benchmark.
Moreover, we adapted to Italian a state-of-the-art
VQA neural architecture, namely LXMERT
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Tan
and Bansal, 2019)</xref>
        , and we trained/evaluated it
using GQA-it. The experimental evaluation in both
languages shows comparable results. This result
is particularly significant given the complexity of
the task and the adoption of noisy, automatically
translated material for training. To the best of our
knowledge, this represents one of the first Italian
VQA systems. GQA-it will be made available to
the research community.
      </p>
      <p>The rest of the paper is organized as follows.
Section 2 summarizes related work. Section 3
describes the new GQA-it dataset. Section 4 presents
the experimental evaluation obtained by creating a
new model by using GQA-it. Conclusions and
future work are drawn in Section 5.</p>
      <p>Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use
permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0).</p>
      <sec id="sec-1-1">
        <title>Available VQA Resources. Pioneering work in</title>
        <p>
          VQA has been made by Malinowski and Fritz
(2014), collecting a dataset of 2,483 unique
English questions about 1,449 real-world images.
Then, Antol et al. (2015) introduced the task of
Visual Question Answering, defined as follows:
Given an image and a natural language question
about the image, the task is to provide an
accurate natural language answer. Both questions and
answers are open-ended and can refer to
different areas of the image. Indeed, VQA systems
require a deep understanding of images and of the
objects they depict, as well as reasoning abilities
about available (multimodal) information. Along
with proposing the new task, the authors also
provided the very first large-scale VQA dataset, made
of about 600k questions on about 200k images,
taken from the Microsoft Objects in Context (MS
COCO) dataset
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">(Lin et al., 2014)</xref>
          .
        </p>
        <p>
          Afterwards, several other datasets on this topic
have been created with the aim to pursue
different goals
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11 ref12 ref22 ref7">(Goyal et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2017;
Zhu et al., 2016; Krishna et al., 2017)</xref>
          . Notably, a
common shortcomings of all these datasets is the
presence of important real-world biases that are
inherited also by neural models exploiting them for
learning. Specifically, several studies report on the
fact that models are driven by superficial
correlations in the training data with the effect of lacking
sufficient visual grounding
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref11 ref7">(Agrawal et al., 2018;
Goyal et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2017)</xref>
          .
        </p>
        <p>
          To mitigate these aspects, the GQA dataset
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Hudson and Manning, 2019)</xref>
          has been
developed starting from Visual Genome
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(Krishna et al.,
2017)</xref>
          . The latter resource is valuable for several
multimodal tasks, as it contains linguistically and
visually more complex annotations. Specifically,
images are annotated with the objects they contain
and the relationships between them. In addition,
Visual Genome contains a wide range of
descriptions relative to specific portions of the image.
Finally, the resource also comes with a visual
question answering layer. However, Visual Genome
is very complex from both a linguistic
(ambiguity and redundancy) and visual (several regions
describe the same objects) perspective, making it
difficult to be easily used to train neural VQA
models. This is the reason why additional
normalization efforts have been performed to create a
new resource, GQA
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Hudson and Manning, 2019)</xref>
          .
From an annotation point of view, the resource is
similar to Visual Genome, but with a lower
linguistic and conceptual variability in terms of
objects, relations, and descriptions. Moreover, to
deal with the bias present in most of the VQA
datasets, the authors created a rich question
engine by exploiting objects, attributes and relations
annotated in Visual Genome
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(Krishna et al., 2017)</xref>
          along with compositional patterns and lexical
resources. In this work, we adopted the GQA dataset
because, differring from the other ones, it
challenges the reasoning capabilities of the models.
Neural models for VQA. The proliferation of
shared tasks on this topic, led to a great
technological enhancement in terms of pre-trained
endto-end models to perform visual question
answering. A first benchmark is represented by the model
proposed by Antol et al. (2015), which uses a CNN
for visual feature extraction and a LSTM or
Recurrent networks for language processing. The
introduction of attention
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2 ref21 ref4">(Chen et al., 2015; Andreas
et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2016)</xref>
          improved the
results on the VQA benchmark allowing the model
to focus on specific portions of the image.
Subsequently, Teney et al. (2018) exploited object
detection to perform VQA. The model employs
RCNN architecture and achieves good results. The
introduction of Transformers and their success in
NLP
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">(Devlin et al., 2019)</xref>
          inspired works based on
large-scale pre-training and fine-tuning studies on
cross-modality. One of the first multimodal
models of this generation was proposed by Tan and
Bansal (2019) with the development of LXMERT,
used in this work. LXMERT has been originally
developed to work with GQA and embeds BERT,
easily adaptable to Italian through its multilingual
counterpart
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">(Pires et al., 2019)</xref>
          .
        </p>
        <p>
          Multilingual approaches for VQA. More
recently, new attempts have been devoted to
Multilingual Visual Question Answering
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">(Gupta et al.,
2020)</xref>
          . However, to the best of our knowledge, no
gold VQA datasets is available for Italian.
Therefore, this work aims to enable the training and
evaluation of VQA methods in Italian, regardless
of whether they are multilingual or not.
3
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>GQA-it: the Italian VQA Dataset</title>
      <p>In order to build a valuable resource for
Italian VQA, we considered the balanced version of
GQA, in which the question distribution has been
smoothed to obtain a more balanced and
representative question/answer sample. In particular,
we started from the benchmark split provided by
Tan and Bansal (2019), namely the train1 and
validation2 material. Moreover, the GQA
test set is not publicly available. Therefore, we
adopted the test-dev3 subset, which represents
a subset of the original test material, but it is
deifned to be highly representative of different
linguistic and conceptual phenomena. Moreover,
systems evaluated on this smaller dataset are
generally in line with respect to the evaluations
applied to the larger test set.</p>
      <p>
        We aim to generate a large-scale dataset in
which training and validation material is obtained
via automatic neural machine translation and the
test material is manually validated. This approach
allows us to i.) create a benchmark test set in
Italian and ii.) measure how sensitive the system
is to the noise introduced by the machine
translation. We thus applied Opus-NMT
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20 ref8">(Tiedemann
and Thottingal, 2020)</xref>
        , a Transformer-based
Neural Machine translation trained on the OPUS
parallel corpus, a large scale collection of texts
semiautomatically aligned for several language pairs.
We selected the model trained on the aligned
subset of documents in the English/Italian pairs.4 The
quality of the translated questions is evaluated on
a portion of the dataset. Notably, manual
validation has been performed on 500 items, consisting
of 250 random questions taken from the training
set and 250 random questions taken from the test
set. Given the characteristics of the texts contained
in GQA (simple texts, no sub-sentence level) and
the implementation simplicity and reproducibility,
we decided to use the BLEU score for the
evaluation. Overall, the performance reaches 0.82.
This is impressively high, but quite in line with the
BLEU obtained by the adopted translation model
over the Tatoeba.it.en dataset (BLEU=0.72)
composed of short sentences with syntactical
complexity similar to the GQA dataset.5
      </p>
      <p>The translation of answers (here expressed only
with one or two tokens) is more problematic. In
fact, many answers should be translated
differ1https://nlp.cs.unc.edu/data/lxmert d
ata/gqa/train.json</p>
      <p>2https://nlp.cs.unc.edu/data/lxmert d
ata/gqa/valid.json</p>
      <p>3https://nlp.cs.unc.edu/data/lxmert d
ata/gqa/testdev.json</p>
      <p>4https://github.com/Helsinki-NLP/OPUS
-MT-train/tree/master/models/it-en
5The results of the model are available in the Github page.
ently depending on the context or associated
image, e.g., an answer “bat” can be translated as the
animal “pipistrello” or the object “mazza”. As
suggested in Croce et al. (2019), in order to
reduce such lexical ambiguity, we translated an
answer by pairing it with the corresponding
question. This way, we exploit the context sensitive
nature of the adopted Transformer-based
architecture: the answer “mouse” is thus correctly
translated when paired with the question “What’s next
to the keyboard?”, while generic translations, such
as “topo”, are systematically preferred when no
context is made available. Unfortunately, the
lexical variability of the automatically translated
answers was problematic. In fact, the initial English
material was characterized by 1, 842 possible
answers types. After the automatic translation, this
number increased to 3, 306. This is partially due
to the cases in which the context does not improve
the translation, e.g., the question “What’s at the
top of the photo?” is not really helpful to
disambiguate the answer “mouse”.</p>
      <p>
        In other cases, multiple ways to translate the
same lexical item exist, e.g., “aircraft” is
translated both as “aeromobile” or “aeroplano”.
Finally, while answers involving singular and
plural expressions were kept separated in the
original dataset, gender is generally not marked in
English, differently from Italian. Most of the times a
context-sensitive translation inflected the
translation in masculine and feminine. For example,
“little” was translated in “piccola”, “piccolo”,
“piccole” and “piccoli” depending on the items
involved in the photo. To reduce this lexical
variability, we applied a manual normalization to
answers associated to more than two questions. We
paired each original English answer with the
translated ones, in order to manually normalize the
translations. While this kind of manual
validation is generally ineffective when dealing with
machine translation, we considered that, by design,
English GQA has a limited amount of polysemy,
as questions, answers, and graph annotations have
been automatically normalized to reduce the
linguistic ambiguity
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Hudson and Manning, 2019)</xref>
        .
In practice, when mentioning a “sign”, answers
(almost) always refer to objects such as a
“signboard” more than a “mark“ or a “gesture”.6 We
preserved singular and plural forms. Actions, e.g.,
6Only the word “glass” was used in both senses of
“bicchiere” and “vetro”, while all other words were generally
characterized by only one sense.
“skating”, “jumping” or “sleeping”, were
translated as the gerundive forms “sta facendo
skateboard”, “sta saltando” e “sta dormendo”.
Unfortunately, the noise introduced when translating
adjectives makes the gender of such words
problematic, so that we normalized all forms to the
masculine gender. After this manual normalization, the
number of possible answers across the dataset is
1, 701.
      </p>
      <p>Table 1 shows the 50 most frequent answers in
both the English and the Italian dataset, showing
that the distribution is generally preserved across
languages.</p>
      <p>GQA
yes (17.6%) - no (17.6%) - left (5.2%) - right (5.1%)
man (1.2%) - white (1.2%) - black (1.1%) - bottom (0.9%)
- woman (0.9%) - chair (0.9%) - blue (0.9%) - top (0.8%)
- table (0.8%) - brown (0.8%) - boy (0.7%) - gray (0.6%)
- dog (0.6%) - green (0.6%) - bed (0.6%) - cat (0.6%)
- girl (0.6%) - red (0.5%) - car (0.5%) - horse (0.5%)
color (0.4%) - bus (0.4%) - desk (0.4%) - large (0.4%)
- orange (0.4%) - couch (0.4%) - small (0.4%) - yellow
(0.4%) - shelf (0.4%) - elephant (0.4%) - people (0.4%)
shirt (0.3%) - train (0.3%) - wood (0.3%) - metal (0.3%)
- truck (0.3%) - child (0.3%) - laptop (0.3%) - jacket
(0.3%) - giraffe (0.3%) - player (0.3%) - field (0.3%)
cabinet (0.3%) - lady (0.3%) - guy (0.3%) - pink (0.2%)</p>
      <p>GQA-it
s`ı (17.6%) - no (17.6%) - sinistra (5.2%) - destra (5.1%)
- uomo (1.2%) - bianco (1.2%) - nero (1.1%) - ragazzo
(1.0%) - inferiore (0.9%) - donna (0.9%) - sedia (0.9%)
- blu (0.9%) - in alto (0.8%) - marrone (0.8%) - tavola
(0.8%) - auto (0.6%) - grigio (0.6%) - cane (0.6%)
verde (0.6%) - letto (0.6%) - divano (0.6%) - gatto (0.6%)
- ragazza (0.6%) - rosso (0.5%) - cavallo (0.5%) -
autobus (0.4%) - colore (0.4%) - piccolo (0.4%) -
scrivania (0.4%) - grande (0.4%) - arancione (0.4%) -
giallo (0.4%) - ripiano (0.4%) - elefante (0.4%) - persone
(0.4%) - cappello (0.4%) - camicia (0.3%) - armadio
(0.3%) - strada (0.3%) - bambino (0.3%) - treno (0.3%)
- camion (0.3%) - legno (0.3%) - campo (0.3%) - metallo
(0.3%) - laptop (0.3%) - giacca (0.3%) - giraffa (0.3%)
giocatore (0.3%) - signora (0.3%)</p>
      <p>Finally, to provide a valuable resource for
realscale evaluation of NLP systems, we manually
validated a subset of the test material, by
correcting 3, 000 question/answer pairs, randomly
selected to preserve data balance. In particular, we
also restored the gender inflection, lost during the
previous normalization process.</p>
      <p>The resulting dataset, namely GQA-it7 is a
large scale (possibly noisy) dataset made of more
than 1.08 M of question/answers insisting on more
7The resource is publicly available at https://gith
ub.com/crux82/gqa-it.</p>
      <p>Dataset
train
valid
test-dev (silver)
test-dev (gold)
#images
than 80k images, with a test set partially validated.
Specific statistics about GQA-it are reported in
Table 2. Note that “silver” refers to non-validated
material, while “gold” refers to manually validated
ones. Each question/answer pair is connected to
an image and the identifiers are aligned to the
original GQA resource, thus enabling the reuse of
further levels of valuable information, such as the
knowledge graph associated with each image.
Figure 1 shows both English and Italian Question
Answer pairs for an example image taken from
GQAit.
To assess the quality of the produced GQA-it
dataset, we trained and evaluated a
state-of-theart VQA system over the automatically
generated material and evaluated over the 3,000
manually validated test set. In particular, we
evaluated LXMERT (Learning Cross-Modality
Encoder Representations from Transformers)
presented by Tan and Bansal (2019).8 This neural
architecture models the VQA problem by
stacking three neural encoders: an object/relationship
encoder encoding (which encodes the input
images), a language encoder (which encodes the
input questions) and a cross-modality encoder (that
combines the above multimodal embeddings). In
a nutshell, LXMERT extracts visual and
linguistic information, combines them in the cross-modal
encoder and applies a (linear) classifier that
associates each image/question pair to one of the n
possible answers considered in the dataset.</p>
      <p>
        The object detector uses a Faster R-CNN model
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref9">(Ren et al., 2015)</xref>
        built over the ResNet-101
backbone
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref9">(He et al., 2015)</xref>
        and pre-trained on the
Visual Genome dataset
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">(Krishna et al., 2017)</xref>
        to
encode salient area of the input images. The
language encoder is implemented as a BERT based
model
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">(Devlin et al., 2019)</xref>
        . In Tan and Bansal
(2019) best results are obtained without using
existing pre-trained BERT models: the weights
of this encoder are randomly initialized and
pre-trained (together with the weights of
crossmodality encoder) using a dedicated large scale
dataset. This is composed of image captions and
related questions of about 9 millions sentences.
This pre-training stage is implemented by
defining 5 auxiliary tasks, e.g., the cross-modal
alignment task (“does the sentence describes the
image?”). Nonetheless, experimental results showed
that good performances can be also obtained by
adopting a pre-trained BERT model. In order to
effectively train LXMERT over GQA-it, we
replaced the specialized English model with a
standard pre-trained BERT model, in particular,
multilingual BERT
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">(Pires et al., 2019)</xref>
        , which is also
available for Italian. We preserved the
original object/relationship encoder (which is language
independent) and randomly initialized the
crossmodality encoder.
      </p>
      <p>Performances are measured in terms of
Accuracy, i.e., the percentage of questions that
exactly received the correct answer. All
experiments were conducted using the same
parameters used in Tan and Bansal (2019) but we
inves8https://github.com/airsplay/lxmert
en
it</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>Model baseline (most freq. answer)</title>
        <p>LXMERT en-pretrain
LXMERT bert-multi.</p>
        <p>LXMERT en-pretrain + MT
LXMERT bert multi. + MT</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>LXMERT-it (gold ans.)</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-3">
        <title>LXMERT-it (silver ans.) Accur.</title>
        <p>tigated up to 15 epochs in the fine-tuning.
Results are reported in Table 3. To compare the
effectiveness of LXMERT on English and Italian
data, we selected the common subset of 3, 000
question/answer pairs in both languages. The
task is extremely challenging: A system
assigning random answers would achieve an accuracy of
0.05%. Considering that the dataset is quite
imbalanced, a baseline system assigning the most
frequent answer (here, “yes”/ “s`ı”) achieves 17.6%.
First, we applied the best model from Tan and
Bansal (2019) (namely en-pretrain) that is
pre-trained over the dedicated corpus: while it
achieves 60.0% (almost the state-of-the-art) on
the entire English test-dev dataset, it achieves
59.0% on this subset. Tan and Bansal (2019) show
that performances drop to 56.2% when using the
original pre-trained BERT, and the English
multilingual counterpart here achieves 55.3%. This
drop in performances confirms the findings of Tan
and Bansal (2019) and represents a sort of
upperbound for the experiments in Italian, as all the
above setups are not affected by the noise
introduced in the training material of GQA-it.</p>
        <p>In order to assess the value of the new Italian
resource, we first evaluated a trivial workflow that
re-used the above English models in an Italian
setting (first two rows in the Italian section of Table
3). First, we automatically translated the Italian
questions using Opus-NMT in English (mtit→en).
Second, we applied the English LXMERT models
(en-pretrain and bert-multilingual)
to derive the English answers. Finally, we
applied Opus-NMT to translate back answers to
Italian (mten→it), after pairing them with the
questions, as discussed in the previous section (cf.
Table 3, rows LXMERT en-pretrain + MT
and LXMERT bert multi. + MT). Indeed,
this trivial workaround achieved significant
results, i.e., 47.1% and 44.8%. This drop is
partially due to the it → en translation, as the
performances of the en-pretrain model drops from
59.0% to 54.5% when applied to English
questions derived via machine translation, while the
bert-multilingual from 55.3% to 51.3%.
We suppose that the language model of LXMERT
is not robust to the noise induced by the NMT.
The remaining performance drop is clearly due to
the translation en → it, mainly due to polysemy
and the other phenomena discussed in the previous
section.</p>
        <p>Conversely, the model trained over
GQAit, namely LXMERT-it, achieves 51.0%
accuracy, which improves the previous results and it
is more in line with the results obtained with
bert-multilingual in English. Evaluating
LXMERT-it w.r.t. the answers generated with the
proposed methodology (namely silver answers)
raises the accuracy to 52.6%. A manual
analysis of the differences reveals that they are mainly
due to gender inflections (e.g., “ alto” vs “alta”,
in English “tall”). Unfortunately, these cases will
inevitably be misclassified by LXMERT-it since
it only observed masculine forms during training
(which were introduced during the initial
normalization phase.</p>
        <p>We performed a qualitative error analysis on a
random sample of the test set (10%). We identified
6 main error classes. Overall, 44% of the
questions produced a wrong answer. First of all, we
can make some considerations on these errors. On
the one hand, specific errors are due to the wrong
identification of objects in the images. In this
paper, we did not modify the visual component of the
architecture, and therefore the corresponding
errors could not be avoided. Many other errors may
be attributed to issues related to the machine
translation, and in general with the creation of a noisy
system for visual question answering. In
particular, some errors are critical for the correct
comprehension of questions and answers, and in general
for using the Italian VQA model. In fact, some
errors compromise the correct understanding of the
answers (e.g., “right” translated in Italian as
“corretto” instead of “destra”), while others allow the
correct (albeit noisy) use of the system, such as the
use of synonyms and hypernyms of the gold class.
5</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Conclusions</title>
      <p>This paper presents GQA-it, a collection of more
than 1 M question/answer pairs in Italian
associError Type Example(s) Perc.
Object tavola (‘table’) vs sedia 31%
(‘chair’)
Synonyms or persona (‘person’) vs donna 17%
hypernyms (‘woman’)
Attributes blu (‘blue’) vs nero (‘black’); 14%
chiuso (‘closed’) vs aperto
(‘open’)
Morph. feat. bella (’beautiful’) vs bello 3%
(‘beautiful’); persona
(‘person’) vs persone (‘people’)
Actions sta dormendo (‘sleeping’) vs 3%
sta sdraiato (‘is lying down)’
Spatial feat. destra (‘right’) vs sinistra 2%
(‘left’)
Residual si (‘yes’) vs no (‘no’) 31%
ated to 80k images in support of research in VQA
in Italian. GQA-it has been obtained with
machine translation, and the quality of the resulting
resource is demonstrated through both direct
evaluation of the translation and indirect evaluation of
a state-of-the-art model trained on this material.</p>
      <p>
        This work represents a first step to leverage a
large-scale VQA resource like GQA for Italian, a
resource whose quality can still largely been
improved. In particular, the knowledge graphs
behind each image will be extremely valuable to
improve the final resource (e.g., using a generation
process as in
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref15 ref18 ref5">(Hudson and Manning, 2019)</xref>
        ) or the
VQA process. Finally, the available alignment
between GQA and GQA-it will foster research in
cross-lingual VQA.
      </p>
      <p>The aim of this paper was to explore the
possibility of semi-automatically inducing large-scale
Italian dataset for VQA. Obviously, we are aware
that there is plenty of room for improvement in
many respects. First, a wide range of approaches
could be tested, aimed at reducing the noise due
to the adaptation of English resources to Italian
ones. Specifically, a viable option could be to
leverage the question and the image together with
each other in order to provide a more consistent
translation. Finally, a multimodal masked
language modeling step on text-image pairs could
enrich the Italian BERT model and make it
comparable with the English counterpart. We plan to probe
these research avenues in the near future.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Acknowledgments</title>
      <p>We would like to thank the “Istituto di Analisi dei
Sistemi ed Informatica - Antonio Ruberti” (IASI)
for supporting the experimentations through
access to dedicated computing resources.</p>
    </sec>
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