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From: tgd@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU (Tom Dietterich)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: NetTalk
Summary: NETtalk has many purposes
Message-ID: <13855@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 16 Nov 89 20:46:46 GMT
References: <4539@arctic.nprdc.arpa>
Organization: Oregon State University, Corvallis
Lines: 32


   wilkins@nprdc.arpa (Charles Wilkins) writes:

   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.  

This is incorrect.  Here is an excerpt from the original paper [1]:

  "Despite these similarities with human learning and memory, NETtalk is
  too simple to serve as a good model for the acquisition of reading
  skills in humans.  The network attempts to accomplish in one stage
  what occurs in two stages in human development.  Children learn to
  talk first, and only after representations for words and their
  meanings are well developed do they learn to read. [...]

  NETtalk can be used as a research tool to explore many aspects of
  network coding, scaling, and training in a domain that is far from
  trivial. [...]"


The NETtalk task is an interesting learning task with potential
practical applications.  It is entirely appropriate to compare the
training time and final performance of NETtalk with other learning
algorithms. 

--Tom Dietterich

[1] Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text.  T.
Sejnowski and C. Rosenberg, Complex Systems 1: 145-68.  1987.