Can Robots Learn Language the Way Children Do?
Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal • Stephen E. Levinson (University of Illinois) • Tuesday 10 July 2007, 11:30-12:30 • LR4, Engineering Department, Baker Building. If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Marcus Tomalin. Speech recognition machines are in use in more and more devices and services. Airlines, banks, and telephone companies provide information to customers via spoken queries. You can buy hand-held devices, appliances, and PCs that are operated by spoken commands. And, for around $100, you can buy a program for your laptop that will transcribe speech into text. Unfortunately, automatic speech recognition systems are quite error prone, nor do they understand the meanings of spoken messages in any significant way. I argue that to do so, speech recognition machines would have to possess the same kinds of cognitive abilities that humans display. Engineers have been trying to build machines with human-like abilities to think and use langu
