  Recent progress in using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for image
description has motivated the exploration of their application for video
description. However, while images are static, working with videos requires
modeling their dynamic temporal structure and then properly integrating that
information into a natural language description. In this context, we propose an
approach that successfully takes into account both the local and global
temporal structure of videos to produce descriptions. First, our approach
incorporates a spatial temporal 3-D convolutional neural network (3-D CNN)
representation of the short temporal dynamics. The 3-D CNN representation is
trained on video action recognition tasks, so as to produce a representation
that is tuned to human motion and behavior. Second we propose a temporal
attention mechanism that allows to go beyond local temporal modeling and learns
to automatically select the most relevant temporal segments given the
text-generating RNN. Our approach exceeds the current state-of-art for both
BLEU and METEOR metrics on the Youtube2Text dataset. We also present results on
a new, larger and more challenging dataset of paired video and natural language
descriptions.
