VisKE: Visual knowledge extraction and question answering by visual verification of relation phrases

How can we know whether a statement about our world is valid. For example, given a relationship between a pair of entities e.g., `eat(horse, hay)', how can we know whether this relationship is true or false in general. Gathering such knowledge about entities and their relationships is one of the fundamental challenges in knowledge extraction. Most previous works on knowledge extraction have focused purely on text-driven reasoning for verifying relation phrases. In this work, we introduce the problem of visual verification of relation phrases and developed a Visual Knowledge Extraction system called VisKE. Given a verb-based relation phrase between common nouns, our approach assess its validity by jointly analyzing over text and images and reasoning about the spatial consistency of the relative configurations of the entities and the relation involved. Our approach involves no explicit human supervision thereby enabling large-scale analysis. Using our approach, we have already verified over 12000 relation phrases. Our approach has been used to not only enrich existing textual knowledge bases by improving their recall, but also augment open-domain question-answer reasoning.