Abstract

Research in massively multilingual image captioning has been severely hampered by a lack of high-quality evaluation datasets. In this paper we present the Crossmodal-3600 dataset (XM3600 in short), a geographically-diverse set of $3600$ images annotated with human-generated reference captions in $36$ languages. The images were selected from across the world, covering regions where the $36$ languages are spoken, and annotated with captions that achieve consistency in terms of style across all languages, while avoiding annotation artifacts due to direct translation. We apply this benchmark to model selection for massively multilingual image captioning models, and show strong correlation results with human evaluations when using XM3600 as golden references for automatic metrics.