William N. Havard

Université Grenoble Alpes · Department of Linguistics

In recent years, deep learning methods allowed the creation of neural models that are able to process several modalities at once. Neural models of Visually Grounded Speech (VGS) are such kind of models and are able to jointly process a spoken input and a matching visual input. They are commonly used to solve a speech-image retrieval task: given a s...

We investigate the effect of introducing phone, syllable, or word boundaries on the performance of a Model of Visually Grounded Speech and compare the results with a model that does not use any boundary information and with a model that uses random boundaries. We introduce a simple way to introduce such information in an RNN-based model and investi...

In this paper, we study how word-like units are represented and activated in a recurrent neural model of visually grounded speech. The model used in our experiments is trained to project an image and its spoken description in a common representation space. We show that a recurrent model trained on spoken sentences implicitly segments its input into...

The CMU Wilderness Multilingual Speech Dataset is a newly published multilingual speech dataset based on recorded readings of the New Testament. It provides data to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for potentially 700 languages. However, the fact that the source content (the Bible), is the same for all the la...

We investigate the behaviour of attention in neural models of visually grounded speech trained on two languages: English and Japanese. Experimental results show that attention focuses on nouns and this behaviour holds true for two very typologically different languages. We also draw parallels between artificial neural attention and human attention...

In spite of the recent success of Dialogue Act (DA) classification, the majority of prior works focus on text-based classification with oracle transcriptions, i.e. human transcriptions, instead of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)'s transcriptions. In spoken dialog systems, however, the agent would only have access to noisy ASR transcriptions, whi...

Many languages are on the brink of extinction and many disappear each and every year at a rate never seen before. Field linguists lack the time and the means to document and describe all of them before they die out. The goal of our work is to help them in their task, make it easier and speed up the data processing and annotation tasks. In this diss...

This paper presents an augmentation of MSCOCO dataset where speech is added to image and text. Speech captions are generated using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis resulting in 616,767 spoken captions (more than 600h) paired with images. Disfluencies and speed perturbation are added to the signal in order to sound more natural. Each speech signal (WA...