Wikipedia-based Image Text (WIT) Dataset is a large multimodal multilingual dataset. WIT is composed of a curated set of 37.6 million entity rich image-text examples with 11.5 million unique images across 108 Wikipedia languages. Its size enables WIT to be used as a pretraining dataset for multimodal machine learning models.

A few unique advantages of WIT:

• The largest multimodal dataset (time of this writing) by the number of image-text examples.
• A massively multilingual dataset (first of its kind) with coverage for over 100+ languages.
• A collection of diverse set of concepts and real world entities.
• Brings forth challenging real-world test sets.

You can learn more about WIT Dataset from our arXiv paper.

For example, let's take the Wikipedia page for Half Dome, Yosemite in CA.

From this page, we highlight the various key pieces of data that we can extract - images, their respective text snippets and some contextual metadata.

By extracting and filering these carefully, we get a clean high quality image-text example that can be used in multimodal modeling.

Multimodal visio-linguistic models rely on a rich dataset to help them learn to model the relationship between images and texts. Having large image-text datasets can significantly improve performance, as shown by recent works. Furthermore the lack of language coverage in existing datasets (which are mostly only in English) also impedes research in the multilingual multimodal space – we consider this a lost opportunity given the potential shown in leveraging images (as a language-agnostic medium) to help improve our multilingual textual understanding.

To address these challenges and advance research on multilingual, multimodal learning we created the Wikipedia-based Image Text (WIT) Dataset. WIT is created by extracting multiple different texts associated with an image (e.g., as shown in the above image) from Wikipedia articles and Wikimedia image links. This was accompanied by rigorous filtering to only retain high quality image-text sets.

The resulting dataset contains over 37.6 million image-text sets – making WIT the largest multimodal dataset (at the time of this writing) with unparalleled multilingual coverage – with 12K+ examples in each of 108 languages (53 languages have 100K+ image-text pairs).

We believe that such a powerful diverse dataset will aid researchers in building better multimodal multilingual models and in identifying better learning and representation techniques leading to improvement of Machine Learning models in real-world tasks over visio-linguistic data.

Please stay tuned and we will share the details about how to download WIT dataset.

We are hoping to make the WIT dataset available for download by March 20th, 2021. (tentatively).

We are planning to release this under the CC-BY-SA license. Exact license type and the license text will be available by the time of the dataset availability.

For any questions, please contact [email protected].