My work pictured by AI – Aris Xanthos

What is this work about? The paper explains how computers can be taught to recognize speech sounds in any language. In human language, there are sounds that carry meaning, and these sounds are called phonemes. The paper shows how a computer can learn to recognize these phonemes from raw speech data, without being told explicitly what the phonemes are. We use several mathematical techniques belonging to a family of methods called “unsupervised learning” to analyze the speech data and group similar sounds together. The resulting groups correspond to phonemes, which are the basic building blocks of language. This research helps us better understand how aspects of natural languages can be learnt by machines or by humans.

The first word that came to mind when seeing the AI-generated picture? Language and computer.