Automatic image captioning is the task of producing a natural-language utterance (usually a sentence) that correctly reflects the visual content of an image. Up to this point, the resource most used for this task was the MS-COCO dataset, containing around 120,000 images and 5-way image-caption annotations (produced by paid annotators).

Google's Conceptual Captions dataset has more than 3 million images, paired with natural-language captions. In contrast with the curated style of the MS-COCO images, Conceptual Captions images and their raw descriptions are harvested from the web, and therefore represent a wider variety of styles. The raw descriptions are harvested from the Alt-text HTML attribute associated with web images. The authors developed an automatic pipeline that extracts, filters, and transforms candidate image/caption pairs, with the goal of achieving a balance of cleanliness, informativeness, fluency, and learnability of the resulting captions.