SPEECH RECOGNITION: BBS Call for Commentators
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Fri Jul 9 12:47:34 EDT 1999
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article
MERGING INFORMATION IN SPEECH RECOGNITION:
FEEDBACK IS NEVER NECESSARY
by Norris D., McQueen J. M., Cutler A.,
*** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please reply by EMAIL by July 21st to:
bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
or write to
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
ECS: New Zepler Building
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
on the Web.
_____________________________________________________________
MERGING INFORMATION IN SPEECH RECOGNITION:
FEEDBACK IS NEVER NECESSARY
Norris Dennis.
Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,
15, Chaucer Rd.,
Cambridge, CB2 2EF, U.K.
Dennis.Norris at mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/
James M. McQueen and Anne Cutler
Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen,
The Netherlands
James.McQueen at mpi.nl and Anne.Cutler at mpi.nl
http://www.mpi.nl
ABSTRACT: Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on
the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that
feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is
accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To
de fend this thesis we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic
decision-making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with
feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to
account for all the available data on phonemic decision-making. The
modular Race model (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by
some recent results however. We therefore present a new modular
model of phonemic decision-making, the Merge model. In Merge,
information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without
feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of
prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts
lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and
nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account
for the data through a process of competition between lexical
hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of
language processing, and conclude that modular models are
particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech
recognition.
KEYWORDS: feedback, modularity, phonemic decisions, lexical
processing, computational modelling, word recognition, speech
recognition, reading,
____________________________________________________________
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web from the US or UK BBS Archive. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.
The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.norris.html
____________________________________________________________
*** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ***
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(1) There have been some very important developments in the
area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
Please see:
Science:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm
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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.
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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.
Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.
Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
public BBS Archive:
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/
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(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
papers to:
Email: bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
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