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Learning Word-Like Units from Joint-Audio Visual Analysis (arxiv.org)
1 point by rch on Jan 29, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A program pairs spoken captions with images to find word-sized chunks of sound and link each to the matching part of the picture. Unlike usual systems that need transcripts and speech recognition, it learned to spot 'lighthouse' and point to lighthouses with no text.

Abstract · Learning Word-Like Units from Joint Audio-Visual Analysis

Given a collection of images and spoken audio captions, we present a method for discovering word-like acoustic units in the continuous speech signal and grounding them to semantically relevant image regions. For example, our model is able to detect spoken instances of the word 'lighthouse' within an utterance and associate them with image regions containing lighthouses. We do not use any form of conventional automatic speech recognition, nor do we use any text transcriptions or conventional linguistic annotations. Our model effectively implements a form of spoken language acquisition, in which the computer learns not only to recognize word categories by sound, but also to enrich the words it learns with semantics by grounding them in images.

David Harwath, James R. Glass
arXiv:1701.07481 · cs.CL, cs.CV · submitted Jan 25, 2017 · updated May 24, 2017
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