log in  |  register  |  feedback?  |  help  |  web accessibility
Logo
Using Semantics to help learn Phonetic Categories
Stella Frank - University of Edinburgh
Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 11:00 am-12:00 pm Calendar
  • You are subscribed to this talk through .
  • You are watching this talk through .
  • You are subscribed to this talk. (unsubscribe, watch)
  • You are watching this talk. (unwatch, subscribe)
  • You are not subscribed to this talk. (watch, subscribe)
Abstract

Computational models of language acquisition seek to replicate human linguistic learning capabilities, such as an infant's ability to identify the relevant sound categories in a language, given similar inputs.  In this talk I will present some on-going work which extends a Bayesian model of phonetic categorisation (Feldman et al., 2013).  The original model learns a lexicon as well as phonetic categories, incorporating the constraint that phonemes appear in word contexts. However, it has trouble separating minimal pairs (such as 'cat'/'caught'/'kite').  The proposed extension adds further information via situational context information, a form of weak semantics or world knowledge, to disambiguate potential minimal pairs.  I will present our current results and discuss potential next steps.

Bio

Stella Frank is currently a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, from whence she received a PhD in Informatics in 2013. Her research interests lie in computational modelling of language acquisition using unsupervised Bayesian modelling techniques.

 

This talk is organized by Jimmy Lin