Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) has
recently attracted much attention because of its practical significance.
However, the existing methods still face the following
challenges: 1) When the models learn intra-modal semantic
association, the temporal causal interaction information and contextual
semantic discriminative information are ignored, resulting
in the lack of intra-modal semantic context connection; 2) When
learning fusion representations, existing cross-modal interaction
modules lack hierarchical attention function to extract intermodal
similarity information and intra-modal self-correlation
information, resulting in insufficient cross-modal information
interaction; 3) When the loss function is optimized, the existing
models ignore the correlation of causal inference between the
start and end boundaries, resulting in inaccurate start and end
boundary calibrations. To conquer the above challenges, we
proposed a novel NLVL model, called Discriminative Parallel
and Hierarchical Attention Network (DPHANet). Specifically,
we emphasized the importance of temporal causal interaction
information and contextual semantic discriminative information
and correspondingly proposed a Discriminative Parallel Attention
Encoder (DPAE) module to infer and encode the above critical
information. Besides, to overcome the shortcomings of the existing
cross-modal interaction modules, we designed a Video-Query
Hierarchical Attention (VQHA) module, which can perform
cross-modal interaction and intra-modal self-correlation modeling
in a hierarchical manner. Furthermore, a novel deviation
loss function was proposed to capture the correlation of causal
inference between the start and end boundaries and force the
model to focus on the continuity and temporal causality in
the video. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark
datasets demonstrated the superiority of our proposed DPHANet
model, which has achieved about 1.5% and 3.5% average
performance improvement and about 2.5% and 7.5% maximum
performance improvement on the Charades-STA and TACoS
datasets respectively.