  Current approaches to learning semantic representations of sentences often
use prior word-level knowledge. The current study aims to leverage visual
information in order to capture sentence level semantics without the need for
word embeddings. We use a multimodal sentence encoder trained on a corpus of
images with matching text captions to produce visually grounded sentence
embeddings. Deep Neural Networks are trained to map the two modalities to a
common embedding space such that for an image the corresponding caption can be
retrieved and vice versa. We show that our model achieves results comparable to
the current state-of-the-art on two popular image-caption retrieval benchmark
data sets: MSCOCO and Flickr8k. We evaluate the semantic content of the
resulting sentence embeddings using the data from the Semantic Textual
Similarity benchmark task and show that the multimodal embeddings correlate
well with human semantic similarity judgements. The system achieves
state-of-the-art results on several of these benchmarks, which shows that a
system trained solely on multimodal data, without assuming any word
representations, is able to capture sentence level semantics. Importantly, this
result shows that we do not need prior knowledge of lexical level semantics in
order to model sentence level semantics. These findings demonstrate the
importance of visual information in semantics.
