  The goal of this paper is to recognize actions in video without the need for
examples. Different from traditional zero-shot approaches we do not demand the
design and specification of attribute classifiers and class-to-attribute
mappings to allow for transfer from seen classes to unseen classes. Our key
contribution is objects2action, a semantic word embedding that is spanned by a
skip-gram model of thousands of object categories. Action labels are assigned
to an object encoding of unseen video based on a convex combination of action
and object affinities. Our semantic embedding has three main characteristics to
accommodate for the specifics of actions. First, we propose a mechanism to
exploit multiple-word descriptions of actions and objects. Second, we
incorporate the automated selection of the most responsive objects per action.
And finally, we demonstrate how to extend our zero-shot approach to the
spatio-temporal localization of actions in video. Experiments on four action
datasets demonstrate the potential of our approach.
