Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!nprdc!wilkins
From: wilkins@nprdc.arpa (Charles Wilkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: NetTalk
Message-ID: <4539@arctic.nprdc.arpa>
Date: 13 Nov 89 15:54:40 GMT
Sender: news@nprdc.arpa
Reply-To: wilkins@nprdc.arpa (Charles Wilkins)
Lines: 15

It seems to me that people are missing the point regarding NetTalk.  Terry
is a biophysicist, and most of the other people involved are psychologists
and linguists.  It would be great if NetTalk outperformed every possible 
alternative method.  But the main purpose of NetTalk is to model human 
performance.  Obviously NetTalk is far from a perfect model of the brain
(just compare number of nodes to number of neurons), but it is probably a 
much better model than a list of linguistic rules.  And if you look at 
Terry's research (and similar models such as Rumelhart and McClelland's,
two psychologists by the way, model of learning the past tense of verbs) 
you will see that the nature of the mistakes (i.e. how similar they are 
to the mistakes humans make) is as important to their models as is the 
degree to which the networks perform.  
It is valid to discuss how well networks compare to other methods, but
it is unfair to attack Terrys work solely on that criterion.