Harpy, production systems and human cognition

Harpy is a speech understanding system that attained (in 1976) a set of highly demanding specifications laid down in 1971 for the recognition of continuous speech (902 accuracy, 1000 words, several speakers, but restricted syntax and semantics). Harpy is an achievement in artificial intelligence, without regard to psychology. Its success, however, makes it worthwhile to ask for its implications for the psychology of speech perception. This paper explores that issue by performing a sufficiency analysis, ie, by constructing a psychological model of speech perception that is faithful to Harpy and then inquiring whether it is acceptable given what we know about human processing capabilities. The strategy for accomplishing this is to select a specific model of basic human cognitive architecture, a production system architecture called HPSA77 that is under investigation independently as a model of cognition; and then to map Harpy into this structure in a way that maintains performance plausibility. The paper (1) presents the production system architecture; (2) presents Harpy; (3) performs the mapping; (4) detours into a consideration of intensity encoding in production systems to solve a problem in the mapping; (5) does the sufficiency analysis; (6) examines what the model says about some human speech phenomena; (7) attempts to state what has been achieved. It seems to the author that a viable and interesting theory of human speech perception has been generated by this exercise, though it has several major difficulties (as noted).

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