ANNABELL, a cognitive system able to learn different languages

© 2018 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved. ANNABELL is a cognitive system entirely based on a large-scale neural architecture capable of learning to communicate through natural language starting from a tabula rasa condition. In order to shed light on the level of cognitive development required for language acquisition, in this work the model is used to study the acquisition of a new language, namely Albanian, in addition to English. The aim is to evaluate in a completely different and more complex language the ability of the model to acquire new information through several examples introduced in the new language and to process the acquired information, answering questions that require the use of different language patterns. The results show that the system is capable of learning cumulatively in either language and to develop a broad range of language processing functionalities in both languages

Script-Based Inference and Memory Retrieval in Subsymbolic Story Processing

DISCERN is an integrated natural language processing system built entirely from distributed neural networks. It reads short narratives about stereotypical event sequences, stores them in episodic memory, generates fully expanded paraphrases of the narratives, and answers questions about them. Processing in DISCERN is based on hierarchically-organized backpropagation modules, communicating through a central lexicon of word representations. The lexicon is a double feature map system that transforms each orthographic word symbol into its semantic representation and vice versa. The episodic memory is a hierarchy of feature maps, where memories are stored "one-shot" at different locations. Several high-level phenomena emerge automatically from the special properties of distributed neural networks in this model. DISCERN learns to infer unmentioned events and unspecified role fillers, generates expectations and defaults, and exhibits plausible lexical access errors and memory interference beh..