MSVD-Indonesian: A Benchmark for Multimodal Video-Text Tasks in Indonesian

Multimodal learning on video and text has seen significant progress, particularly in tasks like text-to-video retrieval, video-to-text retrieval, and video captioning. However, most existing methods and datasets focus exclusively on English. Despite Indonesian being one of the most widely spoken languages, multimodal research in Indonesian remains under-explored, largely due to the lack of benchmark datasets. To address this gap, we introduce the first public Indonesian video-text dataset by translating the English captions in the MSVD dataset into Indonesian. Using this dataset, we evaluate neural network models which were developed for the English video-text dataset on three tasks, i.e., text-to-video retrieval, video-to-text retrieval, and video captioning. Most existing models rely on feature extractors pretrained on English vision-language datasets, raising concerns about their applicability to Indonesian, given the scarcity of large-scale pretraining resources in the language. We apply a cross-lingual transfer learning approach by leveraging English-pretrained extractors and fine-tuning models on our Indonesian dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy improves performance across all tasks and metrics. We release our dataset publicly to support future research and hope it will inspire further progress in Indonesian multimodal learning.