Can phones, syllables, and words emerge as side-products of cross-situational audiovisual learning? -- A computational investigation

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Auteurs principaux: Khorrami, Khazar, Räsänen, Okko
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2021
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author Khorrami, Khazar
Räsänen, Okko
author_facet Khorrami, Khazar
Räsänen, Okko
contents Decades of research has studied how language learning infants learn to discriminate speech sounds, segment words, and associate words with their meanings. While gradual development of such capabilities is unquestionable, the exact nature of these skills and the underlying mental representations yet remains unclear. In parallel, computational studies have shown that basic comprehension of speech can be achieved by statistical learning between speech and concurrent referentially ambiguous visual input. These models can operate without prior linguistic knowledge such as representations of linguistic units, and without learning mechanisms specifically targeted at such units. This has raised the question of to what extent knowledge of linguistic units, such as phone(me)s, syllables, and words, could actually emerge as latent representations supporting the translation between speech and representations in other modalities, and without the units being proximal learning targets for the learner. In this study, we formulate this idea as the so-called latent language hypothesis (LLH), connecting linguistic representation learning to general predictive processing within and across sensory modalities. We review the extent that the audiovisual aspect of LLH is supported by the existing computational studies. We then explore LLH further in extensive learning simulations with different neural network models for audiovisual cross-situational learning, and comparing learning from both synthetic and real speech data. We investigate whether the latent representations learned by the networks reflect phonetic, syllabic, or lexical structure of input speech by utilizing an array of complementary evaluation metrics related to linguistic selectivity and temporal characteristics of the representations. As a result, we find that representations associated...
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2109_14200
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can phones, syllables, and words emerge as side-products of cross-situational audiovisual learning? -- A computational investigation
Khorrami, Khazar
Räsänen, Okko
Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Sound
I.2.0; I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.10
Decades of research has studied how language learning infants learn to discriminate speech sounds, segment words, and associate words with their meanings. While gradual development of such capabilities is unquestionable, the exact nature of these skills and the underlying mental representations yet remains unclear. In parallel, computational studies have shown that basic comprehension of speech can be achieved by statistical learning between speech and concurrent referentially ambiguous visual input. These models can operate without prior linguistic knowledge such as representations of linguistic units, and without learning mechanisms specifically targeted at such units. This has raised the question of to what extent knowledge of linguistic units, such as phone(me)s, syllables, and words, could actually emerge as latent representations supporting the translation between speech and representations in other modalities, and without the units being proximal learning targets for the learner. In this study, we formulate this idea as the so-called latent language hypothesis (LLH), connecting linguistic representation learning to general predictive processing within and across sensory modalities. We review the extent that the audiovisual aspect of LLH is supported by the existing computational studies. We then explore LLH further in extensive learning simulations with different neural network models for audiovisual cross-situational learning, and comparing learning from both synthetic and real speech data. We investigate whether the latent representations learned by the networks reflect phonetic, syllabic, or lexical structure of input speech by utilizing an array of complementary evaluation metrics related to linguistic selectivity and temporal characteristics of the representations. As a result, we find that representations associated...
title Can phones, syllables, and words emerge as side-products of cross-situational audiovisual learning? -- A computational investigation
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Sound
I.2.0; I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14200