Towards an Improved Model for Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling is an intriguing and complex task that only recently entered the language and vision research arena. The task focuses on generating human-like, coherent and visually grounded stories from a sequence of images while maintaining the context over these images. In this study I survey recent advances in the field and conduct a thorough error analysis of three approaches to visual storytelling. I categorize and provide examples of common types of errors, and identify key shortcomings in prior work. Later, I make recommendations for addressing these limitations, and propose an improved model for visual storytelling: a hierarchical encoder-decoder network, with co-attention over the images and their natural language literal descriptions. I assess the performance of this model at generating visual stories. Finally, I experiment with a novel metric, BertScore (Zhang et al.,2019), as an alternative to human evaluation.