  A deeper understanding of video activities extends beyond recognition of
underlying concepts such as actions and objects: constructing deep semantic
representations requires reasoning about the semantic relationships among these
concepts, often beyond what is directly observed in the data. To this end, we
propose an energy minimization framework that leverages large-scale commonsense
knowledge bases, such as ConceptNet, to provide contextual cues to establish
semantic relationships among entities directly hypothesized from video signal.
We mathematically express this using the language of Grenander's canonical
pattern generator theory. We show that the use of prior encoded commonsense
knowledge alleviate the need for large annotated training datasets and help
tackle imbalance in training through prior knowledge. Using three different
publicly available datasets - Charades, Microsoft Visual Description Corpus and
Breakfast Actions datasets, we show that the proposed model can generate video
interpretations whose quality is better than those reported by state-of-the-art
approaches, which have substantial training needs. Through extensive
experiments, we show that the use of commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet
allows the proposed approach to handle various challenges such as training data
imbalance, weak features, and complex semantic relationships and visual scenes.
