Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!usfvax2!pdn!colin
From: colin@pdn.UUCP (Colin Kendall)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: natural language examiners
Keywords: dialect turing
Message-ID: <1882@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 9 Dec 87 15:25:12 GMT
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 46


<Date: Wed, 2 Dec 87 11:16 EST
<From: Rick Wojcik <rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP<
<Subject: Re: Language Learning (a Turing test)
<
<
<In article <2314@homxc.UUCP< lewisd@homxc.UUCP (David Lewis) writes:
<<Has anyone heard about a test like this?
<<Take the pool of native speakers and subject them to this
<<test: to tell whether an arbitrary speaker of their language is a native
<<speaker or not.  
<<The problem: sure, maybe they
<<can say that your wife is not a native speaker of Spanish or French. But
<<perhaps they'll also say that of other native speakers.
<<Only if they can tell native/nonnative with high accuracy should the group
<<be considered a valid test of fluency.
<<-- 
<<David B. Lewis    {ihnp4,allegra,ulysses}!homxc!lewisd
<
<You are probably right up to a point.  Many valid dialects of a language
<do sound like foreign accents.  For the sake of argument, let us require
<that 'native speakers' and examiners be only those with command of the 
<standard dialect of a language.
 
And who is to judge whether a given candidate has "command of the
standard dialect of a language?"  Other "native speakers"?  Who are
they? How do you find them?   And what, by the way, is the 
standard dialect of English?

You could say: "English as it is spoken by network news announcers in
the U.S." -- but then the standard dialect would be dependent on the
hiring and firing whims of their bosses. 

I suspect that the only way to pin it down would be to plot the
frequency spectrum of each spoken sound, and judge an entity to
be speaking the standard dialect iff it does not deviate from
some standard for each spoken sound by more than a set amount and
if the speech rate does not deviate...etc.  But I submit that
it would be conceivable to design a device that "speaks" within
the given limits which would not fool anybody; and vice versa.

-- 
Colin Kendall				Paradyne Corporation
{gatech,akgua}!usfvax2!pdn!colin	Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-8697			8550 Ulmerton Road, PO Box 2826
					Largo, FL  33294-2826