collaborators

7 papers

eess.AS2026

Interpreting Content and Speaker Characteristics in Factorised Self-Supervised Subspaces

Kyle Janse van Rensburg, Herman Kamper

Self-supervised speech features encode both content and speaker information. Recent work introduced an SVD-based factorisation that decomposes these features into a shared content…

cs.CL2026

ZeroSyl: Simple Zero-Resource Syllable Tokenization for Spoken Language Modeling

Nicol Visser, Simon Malan, Danel Slabbert +1

Pure speech language models aim to learn language directly from raw audio without textual resources. A key challenge is that discrete tokens from self-supervised speech encoders re…

cs.CL2026

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

Gabriel Pirlogeanu, Dan Oneata, Horia Cucu +1

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…

eess.AS2026

Recovering the Zipfian Distribution in Unsupervised Term Discovery

Danel Slabbert, Simon Malan, Herman Kamper

Unsupervised term discovery involves segmenting unlabelled speech into word- or syllable-like units and clustering these into a lexicon of candidate types. True lexicons follow a Z…

eess.AS2026

Revisiting Lexicon Evaluation in Unsupervised Word Discovery

Simon Malan, Danel Slabbert, Herman Kamper

Building a lexicon from discovered word-like units is a central goal in zero-resource speech processing. But do our evaluations provide a trustworthy indication of lexicon quality?…

cs.CL2025

Spoken Language Modeling with Duration-Penalized Self-Supervised Units

Nicol Visser, Herman Kamper

Spoken language models (SLMs) operate on acoustic units obtained by discretizing self-supervised speech representations. Although the characteristics of these units directly affect…