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arXiv · 2406.07012

Bridging Language Gaps in Audio-Text Retrieval

Zhiyong Yan·Heinrich Dinkel·Yongqing Wang·Jizhong Liu·Junbo Zhang·Yujun Wang·Bin Wang
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Abstract

Audio-text retrieval is a challenging task, requiring the search for an audio clip or a text caption within a database. The predominant focus of existing research on English descriptions poses a limitation on the applicability of such models, given the abundance of non-English content in real-world data. To address these linguistic disparities, we propose a language enhancement (LE), using a multilingual text encoder (SONAR) to encode the text data with language-specific information. Additionally, we optimize the audio encoder through the application of consistent ensemble distillation (CED), enhancing support for variable-length audio-text retrieval. Our methodology excels in English audio-text retrieval, demonstrating state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on commonly used datasets such as AudioCaps and Clotho. Simultaneously, the approach exhibits proficiency in retrieving content in seven other languages with only 10% of additional language-enhanced training data, yielding promising results. The source code is publicly available https://github.com/zyyan4/ml-clap.

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Zhiyong Yan, Heinrich Dinkel, Yongqing Wang, Jizhong Liu, Junbo Zhang, Yujun Wang, Bin Wang. 2024-06-11. Bridging Language Gaps in Audio-Text Retrieval. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07012

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