Techniques for image captioning with word vector representations are described. In implementations, instead of outputting results of caption analysis directly, the framework is adapted to output points in a semantic word vector space. These word vector representations reflect distance values in the context of the semantic word vector space. In this approach, words are mapped into a vector space and the results of caption analysis are expressed as points in the vector space that capture semantics between words. In the vector space, similar concepts with have small distance values. The word vectors are not tied to particular words or a single dictionary. A post-processing step is employed to map the points to words and convert the word vector representations to captions. Accordingly, conversion is delayed to a later stage in the process.