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

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words -- all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

Speech-text space alignment is a multimodal representation learning method consisting to map different speech and text into a shared representation space, leading to enrichment of the representation of each modality. Proposed architectures, such as SAMU-XLSR, typically follow a student/teacher framework, with the goal of fine-tuning an audio encoder to produce representations that closely match those of the text. In this way a speech representation is semantically enriched. However, such systems generally require large amounts of training data and considerable computational resource, making them difficult to apply to low resources languages under frugal constraints. The present work proposes a data-efficient space alignment method based on Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks and link prediction. The core idea is to leverage message passing to explicitly transfer information from the text modality to the speech modality, thereby reducing the need for large training datasets and intrinsically enriching the acoustic representations, all in a more interpretable manner. Although thoroughly explored for high-resource languages, word-level tasks in speech remain relevant for certain low-resource languages. Therefore, we conducted experiments on speech-text alignment at the word level using the TIMIT (English) dataset and Yemba (a Cameroonian language). Our approach yields results comparable to those of SAMU-XLSR, a state-of-the-art method, and even surpasses it for the Yemba language in the task of word retrieval, while using far fewer resources, demonstrating its power, frugality, and efficiency.

Currently, large language models (LLMs) predominantly focus on the text modality. To enable more natural human-AI interaction, speech LLMs are emerging, but building effective end-to-end speech LLMs remains challenging due to limited data and the difficulty in expanding to more languages. In this paper, we introduce Cross-lingual Speech Language Model (CSLM), an efficient training method for cross-lingual speech LLMs based on discrete speech tokens. We propose a novel alignment strategy that achieves cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment through continual pre-training. By conducting instruction fine-tuning following a speech-text interleaved chain-of-modality generation process, we enhance modal alignment at a finer granularity, thereby improving generation quality and reducing latency. CSLM aligns different modalities and languages simultaneously without the need for massive speech data, thus exhibiting good language scalability. Evaluations on cross-modal tasks, mono-lingual conversational tasks, and cross-lingual conversational tasks demonstrate CSLM's strong cross-modal alignment capabilities and general task abilities. (Code is available at: https://github.com/ictnlp/CSLM)