Topic-Oriented Text Features Can Match Visual Deep Models of Video Memorability

Abstract

Not every visual media production is equally retained in memory. Recent studies have shown that the elements of an image, as well as their mutual semantic dependencies, provide a strong clue as to whether a video clip will be recalled on a second viewing or not. We believe that short textual descriptions encapsulate most of these relationships among the elements of a video, and thus they represent a rich yet concise source of information to tackle the problem of media memorability prediction. In this paper, we deepen the study of short captions as a means to convey in natural language the visual semantics of a video. We propose to use vector embeddings from a pretrained SBERT topic detection model with no adaptation as input features to a linear regression model, showing that, from such a representation, simpler algorithms can outperform deep visual models. Our results suggest that text descriptions expressed in natural language might be effective in embodying the visual semantics required to model video memorability.