On November 1, Professor Stephen E. Levinson gave a brief presentation and led a discussion entitled: Can Robots Learn Language the Way Children Do?
Speech recognition machines are in use in more and more devices and services. Airlines, banks, and telephone companies provide information to customers via spoken queries. You can buy hand-held devices, appliances, and PCs that are operated by spoken commands. And, for around $100, you can buy a program for your laptop that will transcribe speech into text. Unfortunately, automatic speech recognition systems are quite error prone, nor do they understand the meanings of spoken messages in any significant way. Levinson argues that to do so, speech recognition machines would have to possess the same kinds of cognitive abilities that humans display. Engineers have been trying to build machines with human-like abilities to think and use language for nearly 60 years without much success. Are all such efforts doomed to failure? Maybe not. Dr Levinson suggests that if we take a radically different approach, we might succeed. If, instead of trying to program machines to behave intelligently, we design them to learn by experiencing the real world in the same way a child does, we might solve the speech recognition problem in the process. This is the ambitious goal of the research now being conducted in Levinson’s laboratory. To date, Dr Levinson and his colleagues have constructed three robots that have attained some rudimentary visual navigation and object manipulation abilities which they can perform under spoken command
Stephen E. Levinson was born in New York City on September 27, 1944. He received the B. A. degree in Engineering Sciences from Harvard in 1966, and the M. S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, Rhode Island in 1972 and 1974, respectively. From 1966-1969 he was a design engineer at Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut. From 1974-1976 he held a J. Willard Gibbs Instructorship in Computer Science at Yale University. In 1976, he joined the technical staff of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ where he conducted research in the areas of speech recognition and understanding. In 1979 he was a visiting researcher at the NTT Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan. In 1984, he held a visiting fellowship in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University. In 1990, Dr. Levinson became head of the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories where he directed research in Speech Synthesis, Speech Recognition and Spoken Language Translation. In 1997, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he teaches courses in Speech and Language Processing and leads research projects in speech synthesis and automatic language acquisition. Dr. Levinson is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. He is a founding editor of the journal Computer Speech and Language and a former member and chair of the Industrial Advisory Board of the CAIP Center at Rutgers University. He is the author of more than 80 technical papers and holds seven patents. His new book is entitled “Mathematical Models for Speech Technology”
At Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, Dr Levinson conducted research on speech recognition and cybernetics. In 1990, he became head of the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs, directing research on speech synthesis, speech recognition, and spoken language translation. Since 1997, he has been with the University of Illinois, where he teaches courses and conducts research on speech and language processing. He is a founding editor of the journal Computer Speech and Language, the author of more than 60 technical papers and holder of seven patents. He has also written a book: Mathematical Models for Speech Technology. Professor Levinson is a fellow of the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America.