Unsupervised Learning of Spoken Language with Visual Context

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016)

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Authors

David Harwath, Antonio Torralba, James Glass

Abstract

Humans learn to speak before they can read or write, so why can’t computers do the same? In this paper, we present a deep neural network model capable of rudimentary spoken language acquisition using untranscribed audio training data, whose only supervision comes in the form of contextually relevant visual images. We describe the collection of our data comprised of over 120,000 spoken audio captions for the Places image dataset and evaluate our model on an image search and annotation task. We also provide some visualizations which suggest that our model is learning to recognize meaningful words within the caption spectrograms.