Learning words from pictures
Speech recognition systems, such as those that convert speech to text on cellphones, are generally the result of machine learning. A computer pores through thousands or even millions of audio files and their transcriptions, and learns which acoustic features correspond to which typed words. But transcribing recordings is costly, time-consuming work, which has limited speech recognition to a small subset of languages spoken in wealthy nations. At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference this week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are presenting a new approach to training speech-recognition systems that doesn’t depend on transcription. Instead, their system analyzes correspondences between images and spoken descriptions of those images, as captured in a large collection of audio recordings. The system then learns which acoustic features of the recordings correlate with which image characteristics. “The goal of this work is to try to get the machine to learn language more like...