Ad Lingua: Text Classification Improves Symbolism Prediction in Image Advertisements

Abstract

Understanding image advertisements is a challenging task, often requiring non-literal interpretation. We argue that standard image-based predictions are insufficient for symbolism prediction. Following the intuition that texts and images are complementary in advertising, we introduce a multimodal ensemble of a state of the art image-based classifier, a classifier based on an object detection architecture, and a fine-tuned language model applied to texts extracted from ads by OCR. The resulting system establishes a new state of the art in symbolism prediction.