Linguistic Structure as Composition and Perturbation

This paper discusses the problem of learning language from unprocessed text and speech signals, concentrating on the problem of learning a lexicon. In particular, it argues for a representation of language in which linguistic parameters like words are built by perturbing a composition of existing parameters. The power of this representation is demonstrated by several examples in text segmentation and compression, acquisition of a lexicon from raw speech, and the acquisition of mappings between text and arti cial representations of meaning. 1 Motivation Language is a robust and necessarily redundant communication mechanism. Its redundancies commonly manifest themselves as predictable patterns in speech and text signals, and it is largely these patterns that enable text and speech compression. Naturally, many patterns in text and speech reect interesting properties of language. For example, the is both an unusually frequent sequence of letters and an English word. This suggests using co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Carl de Marcken
• Keywords: ACL 1996, ACL 2007, Arti Cial Representations, Speech Signals, Unprocessed Text