An automatic child-directed speech detector for the study of child language development

http://interspeech2012.org/accepted-abstract.html?id=210In this paper, we present an automatic child-directed speech detection system to be used in the study of child language development. Child-directed speech (CDS) is speech that is directed by caregivers towards infants. It is not uncommon for corpora used in child language development studies to have a combination of CDS and non-CDS. As the size of the corpora used in these studies grow, manual annotation of CDS becomes impractical. Our automatic CDS detector addresses this issue. The focus of this paper is to propose and evaluate different sets of features for the detection of CDS, using several offthe-shelf classifiers. First, we look at the performance of a set of acoustic features. We continue by combining these acoustic features with several linguistic and eventually contextual features. Using the full set of features, our CDS detector was able to correctly identify CDS with an accuracy of.88 and F1 score of.87 using Naive Bayes. Index Terms: motherese, automatic, child-directed speech, infant-directed speech, adult-directed speech, prosody, language development

How people talk when teaching a robot

We examine affective vocalizations provided by human teach-ers to robotic learners. In unscripted one-on-one interac-tions, participants provided vocal input to a robotic dinosaur as the robot selected toy buildings to knock down. We find that (1) people vary their vocal input depending on the learner’s performance history, (2) people do not wait until a robotic learner completes an action before they provide in-put and (3) people näıvely and spontaneously use intensely affective vocalizations. Our findings suggest modifications may be needed to traditional machine learning models to better fit observed human tendencies. Our observations of human behavior contradict the popular assumptions made by machine learning algorithms (in particular, reinforcement learning) that the reward function is stationary and path-independent for social learning interactions. We also propose an interaction taxonomy that describes three phases of a human-teacher’s vocalizations: direction, spoken before an action is taken; guidance, spoken as the learner communicates an intended action; and feedback, spo-ken in response to a completed action

Sur les interactions entre la robotique et les sciences de l'esprit et du comportement

The interaction of robotics with biological, behavioural and brain sciences has always been tight. As often described in the literature, the living has often inspired the construction of robots. In this article, we focus on the reverse phenomenon: building robots can impact importantly the way we conceptualize behaviour and intelligence in animals and humans. After arguing that this two-way interaction has been present since the very first robots in the beginning of the 20th century, I analyze the spectrum of the various kinds of contributions that robotics has provided to behavioural and brain sciences. Based on a series of paradigmatic examples spanning from the modelling of insect navigation, the experimentation of the role of morphology to control walking, the self- organization of language in robot societies, and the use of robots as therapeutic tools for children with developmental disorders, I review the way robots can be used as operational models confronting specific theories to reality, or can be used as proof of concepts, or as conceptual exploration tools generating new hypotheses, or used as experimental set ups to uncover particular behavioural properties in animals or humans, or even used as therapeutic tools

sur le rôle de la robotique dans les sciences de l'esprit et du comportement

to appearInternational audienceC'est en 1912 que les ingénieurs John Hammond Jr. et Benjamin Miessner construisirent l'un des premiers robots, qui fit grand bruit dans la presse américaine et secoua le monde scientifique (Cordeschi, 2002). Ce robot, appelé "Electric dog", était une machine électrique à roues dont le mécanisme la faisait s'orienter vers les sources lumineuses et les suivre selon des trajectoires à la fois réactives et complexes. A l'instar du magazine "Electrical Experimenter", la presse et le grand public décrirent très vite cette machine comme "pensante", "d'une intelligence presque surhumaine", et comme l'une des "inventions les plus sensationnelles "qui aient été faites. L'impact fut encore accru par le fait que Hammond et Miessner destinaient cette technologie à un usage militaire : ils voulaient équiper torpilles et missiles de ce système, afin qu'ils puissent automatiquement viser les batteries anti-aériennes ennemies qui de nuit utilisaient de puissants projecteurs lumineux (Miessner, 1912)