The Acquisition of a Lexicon from Paired Phoneme Sequences and Semantic Representations

We present an algorithm that acquires words (pairings of phonological forms and semantic representations) from larger utterances of unsegmented phoneme sequences and semantic representations. The algorithm maintains from utterance to utterance only a single coherent dictionary, and learns in the presence of homonymy, synonymy, and noise. Test results over a corpus of utterances generated from the Childes database of mother-child interactions are presented.