Spoken Language Acquisition Based On Reinforcement Learning And Word Unit Segmentation

The process of spoken language acquisition has been one of the topics which attract the greatest interesting from linguists for decades. By utilizing modern machine learning techniques, we simulated this process on computers, which helps to understand the mystery behind the process, and enable new possibilities of applying this concept on, but not limited to, intelligent robots. This paper proposes a new framework for simulating spoken language acquisition by combining reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning methods. Our experiments also show that the speed of acquiring spoken language can be improved by identifying potential word segments from collected ambient sounds in an unsupervised manner.