Understanding Advertisements

摘要

While AI systems are capable of reading texts and seeing images, they typically perceive surface information explicitly conveyed with limited abilities to comprehend hidden messages (e.g., a double-edged remark). We propose the novel task of advertisement understanding: given an advertisement, which can be a text, an image, or a video, the goal is to identify the persuasion strategies used and determine the (possibly hidden) messages conveyed. Efforts on this task could enhance machine comprehension capabilities, and provide users with increased situation awareness w.r.t. the advertised message and thus possibly enable mindful decision making. We believe that this task presents long-term challenges to AI researchers and that successful understanding of ads could bring machine understanding one important step closer to human understanding.