The past two decades have shown an unexpected effectiveness of "Web-scale" data in natural language processing. Even the simplest models, when paired with unprecedented amounts of unstructured and unlabeled Web data, have been shown to outperform sophisticated ones. It has been argued that the effectiveness of Web-scale data has…

Learning a phonetic category (or any linguistic category) requires integrating different sources of information. A crucial unsolved problem for phonetic learning is how this integration occurs: how can we update our previous knowledge about a phonetic category as we hear new exemplars of the category? One model of learning is Bayesian Inference,…