THE GENERATIVE POWER OF FEATURE GEOMETRY

The paper presents a formalization of the common structure underlying different proposals concerning the geometry of phonological features. Using the concepts and tools of elementary set theory, lattice theory, and the theory of independent boolean algebras, a metatheory of autosegmental feature structure is developed. This metatheory enables us to compare contemporary autosegmental phonology to the now abandoned “standard ” phonology and to the historically important Pān. ini-type phonology as well, and to investigate the restrictions on the use of features in phonological theory.

LANGUAGE MODELS: WHERE ARE THE BOTTLENECKS?

Statistical, parsing, database, and other methods of bringing contextual information to bear on the recognition task are described in a uniform framework in which the central data structure mediating between the recognition and the contextual components is a segment lattice, a directed graph that contains the alternative segments and their confidence/probability ranking. Explicit measures of the value of such segment lattices and the correctness of language models are proposed, and the dominant technologies are critically evaluated. 0 Introduction Since stand-alone recognition is unlikely to provide high quality output in the foreseeable future, the overall performance of recognition systems will continue to be critically impacted by the language model. Section 1 of this paper provides a critical overview of the traditional system architecture in which a language model component acts as a postprocessor correcting the output of the recognizer, and proposes explicit measures of the cont..

Realizing Monads

We reconstruct monads as cyclic finite state automata whose states are what Leibniz calls perceptions and whose transitions are automatically triggered by the next time tick he calls entelechy. This goes some way toward explaining key aspects of the Monadology, in particular, the lack of inputs and outputs (§7) and the need for universal harmony (§59)

Bounding the impact of AGI

Humans already have a certain level of autonomy, defined here as capability for voluntary purposive action, and a certain level of rationality, i.e. capability of reasoning about the consequences of their own actions and those of others. Under the prevailing concept of artificial general intelligences (AGIs), we envision artificial agents that have at least this high, and possibly considerably higher, levels of autonomy and rationality. We use the method of bounds to argue that AGIs meeting these criteria are subject to Gewirth's dialectical argument to the necessity of morality, compelling them to behave in a moral fashion, provided Gewirth's argument can be formally shown to be conclusive. The main practical obstacles to bounding AGIs by means of ethical rationalism are also discussed. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

RELATING PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL CATEGORIES

Recent proposals to treat phonetic representations as the semantic interpretation of phonological representations are technically problematic to implement. The main difficulty is that phonological representations are discrete while phonetic representations are continuous which makes the standard method of describing semantic interpretation as a homomorphism between sortally equivalent algebras hard to generalize. The paper solves the technical problem by introducing a notion of homomorphisms. First, the operation of concatenation is defined in the usual way for strings and as `continuation' for continuous scalar-vector functions with finite support, and the set of phonetic representations is equipped with a measure. Next a.e. homomorphisms are rigorously defined and the semantic relationship between phonological and phonetic categories is made explicit in terms of these homomorphisms. Finally constant target (triphone) models, which play a central role in speech recognition, are reconstructed in this semantic framework