  Despite the availability of a huge amount of video data accompanied by
descriptive texts, it is not always easy to exploit the information contained
in natural language in order to automatically recognize video concepts. Towards
this goal, in this paper we use textual cues as means of supervision,
introducing two weakly supervised techniques that extend the Multiple Instance
Learning (MIL) framework: the Fuzzy Sets Multiple Instance Learning (FSMIL) and
the Probabilistic Labels Multiple Instance Learning (PLMIL). The former encodes
the spatio-temporal imprecision of the linguistic descriptions with Fuzzy Sets,
while the latter models different interpretations of each description's
semantics with Probabilistic Labels, both formulated through a convex
optimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a novel technique to extract
weak labels in the presence of complex semantics, that consists of semantic
similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on two distinct problems,
namely face and action recognition, in the challenging and realistic setting of
movies accompanied by their screenplays, contained in the COGNIMUSE database.
We show that, on both tasks, our method considerably outperforms a
state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach, as well as other baselines.
