Robot programmed to learn words by listening, just like infants

Los Angeles Times : Caroline Lyon of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and her colleagues have conducted a study with a 1-meter-tall humanoid robot called DeeChee that could produce all the English syllables needed for speech, but was incapable of uttering any English wordsâmdash;at least at first. Lyon’s team then programmed DeeChee’s computer brain to listen to what humans told it, break up the audio streams into individual syllables, and then rank the syllables by frequency. DeeChee was also programmed to react positively to “Good!,” “Well done!,” and other encouraging remarks. Top-ranked syllables formed the robot’s nascent vocabulary. DeeChee quickly picked up common nouns and adjectives, but struggled with common prepositions, even though the prepositions occur frequently in speech. That difference in comprehension, Lyon speculates, arises because “at” or “in” are used in more ways than, say, “blue” or “house.” A paper about the project appeared last week in PlosOne.