Lecture Presentations Multimodal Dataset: Towards Understanding Multimodality in Educational Videos

Many educational videos use slide presentations, a sequence of visual pages that contain text and figures accompanied by spoken language, which are constructed and presented carefully in order to optimally transfer knowledge to students. Previous studies in multimedia and psychology attribute the effectiveness of lecture presentations to their multimodal nature. As a step toward developing vision-language models to aid in student learning as intelligent teacher assistants, we introduce the Lecture Presentations Multimodal (LPM) Dataset as a large-scale benchmark testing the capabilities of vision-and-language models in multimodal understanding of educational videos. Our dataset contains aligned slides and spoken language, for 180+ hours of video and 9000+ slides, with 10 lecturers from various subjects (e.g., computer science, dentistry, biology). We introduce three research tasks, (1) figure-to-text retrieval, (2) text-to-figure retrieval, and (3) generation of slide explanations, which are grounded in multimedia learning and psychology principles to test a vision-language model’s understanding of multimodal content. We provide manual annotations to help implement these tasks and establish baselines on them. Comparing baselines and human student performances, we find that state-of-the-art vision-language models (zero-shot and fine-tuned) struggle in (1) weak crossmodal alignment between slides and spoken text, (2) learning novel visual mediums, (3) technical language, and (4) long-range sequences. We introduce PolyViLT, a novel multimodal transformer trained with a multi-instance learning loss that is more effective than current approaches for retrieval. We conclude by shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in multimodal understanding of educational presentation videos.