  Vision and language are two fundamental capabilities of human intelligence.
Humans routinely perform tasks through the interactions between vision and
language, supporting the uniquely human capacity to talk about what they see or
hallucinate a picture on a natural-language description. The valid question of
how language interacts with vision motivates us researchers to expand the
horizons of computer vision area. In particular, "vision to language" is
probably one of the most popular topics in the past five years, with a
significant growth in both volume of publications and extensive applications,
e.g., captioning, visual question answering, visual dialog, language
navigation, etc. Such tasks boost visual perception with more comprehensive
understanding and diverse linguistic representations. Going beyond the
progresses made in "vision to language," language can also contribute to vision
understanding and offer new possibilities of visual content creation, i.e.,
"language to vision." The process performs as a prism through which to create
visual content conditioning on the language inputs. This paper reviews the
recent advances along these two dimensions: "vision to language" and "language
to vision." More concretely, the former mainly focuses on the development of
image/video captioning, as well as typical encoder-decoder structures and
benchmarks, while the latter summarizes the technologies of visual content
creation. The real-world deployment or services of vision and language are
elaborated as well.
