  This paper introduces a novel method for the representation of images that is
semantic by nature, addressing the question of computation intelligibility in
computer vision tasks. More specifically, our proposition is to introduce what
we call a semantic bottleneck in the processing pipeline, which is a crossing
point in which the representation of the image is entirely expressed with
natural language , while retaining the efficiency of numerical representations.
We show that our approach is able to generate semantic representations that
give state-of-the-art results on semantic content-based image retrieval and
also perform very well on image classification tasks. Intelligibility is
evaluated through user centered experiments for failure detection.
