JAIR article

[Steve Minton]

Readers of this newsgroup may be interested the following article, which
was recently published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research:

Ling, C.X.  (1994)
  "Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs: The Symbolic Pattern Associator
   vs. Connectionist Models", Volume 1, pages 209-229

   Postscript: volume1/ling94a.ps (247K)
   Online Appendix: volume1/ling-appendix.Z (109K) data file, compressed

   Appendix: Learning the past tense of English verbs - a seemingly minor
   aspect of language acquisition - has generated heated debates since
   1986, and has become a landmark task for testing the adequacy of
   cognitive modeling. Several artificial neural networks (ANNs) have
   been implemented, and a challenge for better symbolic models has been
   posed.  In this paper, we present a general-purpose Symbolic Pattern
   Associator (SPA) based upon the decision-tree learning algorithm ID3.
   We conduct extensive head-to-head comparisons on the generalization
   ability between ANN models and the SPA under different
   representations. We conclude that the SPA generalizes the past tense
   of unseen verbs better than ANN models by a wide margin, and we offer
   insights as to why this should be the case.  We also discuss a new
   default strategy for decision-tree learning algorithms.

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