# Semantic speech retrieval with a visually grounded model of untranscribed speech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01949 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01949/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Cross-Modal Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05438/) (2021)
- [Visually grounded models of spoken language: A survey of datasets, architectures and evaluation techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13225/) (2021)
- [SpeechCLIP: Integrating Speech with Pre-Trained Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00705/) (2022)
- [Attention-Based Keyword Localisation in Speech using Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08859/) (2021)
- [Can phones, syllables, and words emerge as side-products of cross-situational audiovisual learning? -- A computational investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14200/) (2021)
- [SpeechDPR: End-to-End Spoken Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Spoken Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13463/) (2024)
- [Syllable Discovery and Cross-Lingual Generalization in a Visually Grounded, Self-Supervised Speech Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11435/) (2023)
- [M-SpeechCLIP: Leveraging Large-Scale, Pre-Trained Models for Multilingual Speech to Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01180/) (2022)
- [YFACC: A Yor`ub'a speech-image dataset for cross-lingual keyword localisation through visual grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04600/) (2022)
- [Keyword localisation in untranscribed speech using visually grounded speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01107/) (2022)
- [ZR-2021VG: Zero-Resource Speech Challenge, Visually-Grounded Language Modelling track, 2021 edition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06546/) (2021)
- [Towards visually prompted keyword localisation for zero-resource spoken languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06229/) (2022)
- [Visually grounded few-shot word learning in low-resource settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11371/) (2023)
- [Visually Grounded Speech Models have a Mutual Exclusivity Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13922/) (2024)
- [Acoustic Word Embeddings for Untranscribed Target Languages with Continued Pretraining and Learned Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02153/) (2023)
- [Leveraging multilingual transfer for unsupervised semantic acoustic word embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02083/) (2023)
- [Translating speech with just images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07133/) (2024)
- [Computational modeling of early language learning from acoustic speech and audiovisual input without linguistic priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08359/) (2026)
- [Modelling word learning and recognition using visually grounded speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06937/) (2022)
- [Mapping Written Words to Spoken Words in a Different Language Using Only Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26925/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is growing interest in models that can learn from unlabelled speech paired with visual context. This setting is relevant for low-resource speech processing, robotics, and human language acquisition research. Here we study how a visually grounded speech model, trained on images of scenes paired with spoken captions, captures aspects of semantics. We use an external image tagger to generate soft text labels from images, which serve as targets for a neural model that maps untranscribed speech to (semantic) keyword labels. We introduce a newly collected data set of human semantic relevance judgements and an associated task, semantic speech retrieval, where the goal is to search for spoken utterances that are semantically relevant to a given text query. Without seeing any text, the model trained on parallel speech and images achieves a precision of almost 60% on its top ten semantic retrievals. Compared to a supervised model trained on transcriptions, our model matches human judgements better by some measures, especially in retrieving non-verbatim semantic matches. We perform an extensive analysis of the model and its resulting representations.