  Sketching and natural languages are effective communication media for
interactive applications. We introduce Sketchforme, the first
neural-network-based system that can generate sketches based on text
descriptions specified by users. Sketchforme is capable of gaining high-level
and low-level understanding of multi-object sketched scenes without being
trained on sketched scene datasets annotated with text descriptions. The
sketches composed by Sketchforme are expressive and realistic: we show in our
user study that these sketches convey descriptions better than human-generated
sketches in multiple cases, and 36.5% of those sketches are considered to be
human-generated. We develop multiple interactive applications using these
generated sketches, and show that Sketchforme can significantly improve
language learning applications and support intelligent language-based sketching
assistants.
