SemEval-2020 Task 10: Emphasis Selection for Written Text in Visual Media

Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, pages 1360–1370 Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 12, 2020. 1360 SemEval-2020 Task 10: Emphasis Selection for Written Text in Visual Media Amirreza Shirani†, Franck Dernoncourt‡, Nedim Lipka‡, Paul Asente‡, Jose Echevarria‡, and Thamar Solorio† †University of Houston ‡Adobe Research †{ashirani,tsolorio}@uh.edu ‡{franck.dernoncourt,lipka,asente,echevarr}@adobe.com Abstract In this paper, we present the main findings and compare the results of SemEval-2020 Task 10, Emphasis Selection for Written Text in Visual Media. The goal of this shared task is to design automatic methods for emphasis selection, i.e. choosing candidates for emphasis in textual content to enable automated design assistance in authoring. The main focus is on short text instances for social media, with a variety of examples, from social media posts to inspirational quotes. Participants were asked to model emphasis using plain text with no additional context from the user or other design considerations. SemEval-2020 Emphasis Selection shared task attracted 197 participants in the early phase and a total of 31 teams made submissions to this task. The highest-ranked submission achieved 0.823 Matchm score. The analysis of systems submitted to the task indicates that BERT and RoBERTa were the most common choice of pre-trained models used, and part of speech tag (POS) was the most useful feature. Full results can be found on the task’s website1. 1 Introduction In visual communication, emphasis is an intentional focus on one or more components to create a main focal point or center of interest with the composition. It has been found that it only takes the human eye 50 milliseconds to form an opinion on a visual composition (Lindgaard et al., 2006). Therefore, it is important for a visual element to deliver a clear message by calling attention to specific information. Whether on flyers, posters, ads, social media posts or motivational messages, emphasis is usually designed to grab a viewer’s attention by being distinct from the rest of the design elements. Thanks to various online platforms, a massive amount of digital text is being generated by users every day. These media are filled with content competing for attention and are usually highly designed to engage viewers’ attention to convey their message in the most efficient way. For textual content, word emphasis is used as a powerful tool to better convey the desired meaning of the written text to the audience. Utilizing emphasis techniques can potentially add another dimension to the text through visualization. Emphasis on textual content can be done with colors, backgrounds, or fonts, or with styles like italic and boldface to clarify or even change the meaning of a sentence by drawing attention to some specific information. Figure 1a shows an example that is aesthetically appealing but fails to effectively communicate its intent. Understanding the text would allow the system to propose a different layout that emphasizes words that contribute more to the communication of the intent, as shown in Figure 1b. In the last few years, we have observed many significant improvements in various platforms for generating, formatting, …

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