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Query Prior Matters: A MRC Framework for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) is a vision-language task where the system is required to detect entity spans and corresponding entity types given a sentence-image pair. Existing methods capture text-image relations with various attention mechanisms that only obtain implicit alignments between entity types and image regions. To locate regions more accurately and better model cross-/within-modal relations, we propose a machine reading comprehension based framework for MNER, namely MRC-MNER. By utilizing queries in MRC, our framework can provide prior information about entity types and image regions. Specifically, we design two stages, Query-Guided Visual Grounding and Multi-Level Modal Interaction, to align fine-grained type-region information and simulate text-image/inner-text interactions respectively. For the former, we train a visual grounding model via transfer learning to extract region candidates that can be further integrated into the second stage to enhance token representations. For the latter, we design text-image and inner-text interaction modules along with three sub-tasks for MRC-MNER. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on two public MNER datasets, Twitter2015 and Twitter2017. Experimental results show that MRC-MNER outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on Twitter2017, and yields competitive results on Twitter2015.