Neural net learning vowels

Posted by ljmacphee on August 8, 2007 under artificial intelligence in the news |

Infants still have a chubby leg up on the best supercomputers when it comes to picking up languages, but now researchers have created a program that can teach itself to distinguish vowel sounds like those in “train” and “bed.” The software, the first to figure out vowel categories from human sounds, lends credence to the notion that language is more learned than innate.

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Instead of telling his neural network ahead of time how many categories to expect, the researchers had their network constantly guess how many categories there ought to be while analyzing thousands of sound clips. The program quickly began clustering the sounds into only a few vowel categories. It could lump the vowel sounds from the average mother into four categories more than 80% of the time, McClelland’s team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that, says McClelland, bolsters the idea that much can be learned with little assumed. . . .

More information:
A baby step for computer learning