(Ordonez et al., 2011) and (Kuznetsova et al., 2012) are examples of retrieval in visual space; other approaches rely on retrieval in multimodal space (Hodosh et al., 2013, Socher et al., 2014.
this raises the possibility of more in-depth investigation of the use of language in a specific domain, including the identification and description of salient or distinguishing features (say, eye colour, the shape of a face, emotion or ethnicity) and the investigation of the conditions under which they tend to feature in human descriptions.