Total: 4
For over four decades, our research community has taken remarkable strides in advancing human language technologies. This has resulted in the emergence of spoken dialogue interfaces that can communicate with humans on their own terms. For the most part, however, we have assumed that these interfaces are static; it knows what it knows and doesn't know what it doesn't. In my opinion, we are not likely to succeed until we can build interfaces that behave more like organisms that can learn, grow, reconfigure, and repair themselves, much like humans. In this paper, I will argue my case and outline some new research challenges.
Functional imaging techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), have enabled neuroscientists to elaborate how the human brain solves the formidable problem of decoding the speech signal. In this paper I will outline the properties of primate auditory cortex, and use this as an anatomical framework to address the data from functional imaging studies of auditory processing and speech perception. I will outline how at least two different streams of processing can be seen in primary auditory cortex, and that this apparently maps onto two different ways in which the human brain processes speech. I will also address data suggesting that there are considerable hemispheric asymmetries in speech perception.
Computers have become an essential part of modern life, providing services in a multiplicity of ways. Access to these services, however, comes at a price: human attention is bound and directed toward a technical artifact in a human-machine interaction setting at the expense of time and attention for other humans. This paper explores a new class of computer services that support human- human interaction and communication
How did culturally shared systems of combinatorial speech sounds initially appear in human evolution? This paper proposes the hypothesis that their bootstrapping may have happened rather easily if one assumes an individual capacity for vocal replication, and thanks to self-organization in the neural coupling of vocal modalities and in the coupling of babbling individuals. This hypothesis is embodied in agent-based computational experiments, that allow to show that crucial phenomena, including structural regularities and diversity of sound systems, can only be accounted if speech is considered as a complex adaptive system. Thus, the second objective of this paper is to show that integrative computational approaches, even if speculative in certain respects, might be key in the understanding of speech and its evolution.