Comparisons of NetTalk to other approaches

[Tom Dietterich]

There are two studies that I know of comparing NETtalk to
decision-tree methods such as Quinlan's ID3.

1. Mooney, R., Shavlik, J., Towell, G., and Gove, A. (1989).  An
experimental comparison of symbolic and connectionist learning
algorithms.  {\it IJCAI-89: Eleventh International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence}.  775--80.

   This paper included a simple comparison of ID3 and backprop on the
   nettalk task. 


2. Dietterich, T. G., Hild, H., Bakiri, G. (1990)  A comparative
study of ID3 and backpropagation for English text-to-speech mapping.
To appear in 1990 Machine Learning Conference, Austin, TX.

   This is a more detailed study.  I'll be producing a tech report
   soon and I'll announce availability to connectionists.

The bottom line seems to be that, while backprop is awkward and
time-consuming to apply, it does give slightly better results on this
task.