Mapping Written Words to Spoken Words in a Different Language Using Only Visual Grounding

arXiv:2608.26925 · cs.CL, eess.AS · Submitted 2026-08-27 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, eess.AS

Submitted: 2026-08-27

Updated: 2026-08-27

Comments: 9 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables, preprint, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Code: https://github.com/gabitza-tech/vgs-cl-vocab

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: In many low-resource settings, even just eliciting speech for data collection is difficult.

Terminology

Abstract

In many low-resource settings, even just eliciting speech for data collection is difficult. One promising approach has been to ask speakers to describe images. But how do we build models from such visually grounded speech data? Given a dataset of images with Hindi spoken captions, we consider how we can map a written English keyword to spoken realisations of that word in Hindi. Previous work trained end-to-end multimodal neural models. Instead, we explore a simpler alignment-based approach built on self-supervised speech representations. Written English tags are automatically obtained from images using off-the-shelf image captioning systems. Hindi utterances associated with the same keyword are then aligned (using self-supervised features), and alignment evidence is aggregated to identify recurring speech segments corresponding to the target word. Experiments evaluating keyword spotting and localization show that our alignment-based approach outperforms a previous attention-based neural model. We also show the benefit of incorporating negative examples during alignment. Our work demonstrates that cross-lingual word-to-speech mappings can be learned directly from visual grounding without transcriptions or explicit model training.

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