capture promoted Tier 1-2 (see per-claim notes; primary PDF text could not be directly rendered in this environment — see caveat) 2026-07-09

Exact publication year and page range of the NETtalk paper (Sejnowski & Rosenberg)

Harvested from 2026-06-30-who-first-applied-backpropagation-to-a-practical-recognition-task-and-when. Core question: what is the exact publication year and page range of the NETtalk paper, per the primary PDF?

Tooling caveat (read before trusting the tier ratings below) Per operating spec, PDF sources should be fetched with extract_pdf and read directly. In this session, extract_pdf failed on all three candidate PDF URLs with [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'pdfinfo' — a missing environment dependency (poppler-utils), not a source-availability problem. WebFetch on the same PDFs returned only raw/garbled binary (the Salk and Wolfram-hosted copies appear to be scanned image PDFs, e.g. CCITT-encoded fax-style scans, with no accessible text layer via this tool). Direct network access via Bash (curl) was blocked by the sandbox. So the claims below rest on: (a) the journal's own abstract page (true Tier 1, publisher-hosted, HTML — resolves and was read directly), and (b) search-engine-indexed text snippets that appear to be extracted verbatim from the primary PDF's own running header on two independent host copies (Salk CNL's own archive of Sejnowski's lab, and a UBC teaching-materials mirror). These snippets are exact quoted strings, not paraphrase, and two independent copies agree — but neither this agent nor the vault's tools directly rendered the PDF page image to confirm with its own eyes. Flagging this so Seek can re-attempt with working PDF tooling before final promotion if a higher bar is wanted.

Claim: The NETtalk paper (the one usually meant by that name) was published in 1987 in Complex Systems, Volume 1, Issue 1

The paper "Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text" by Terrence J. Sejnowski and Charles R. Rosenberg — the document almost universally cited as "the NETtalk paper" — appeared in Complex Systems, Volume 1, Issue 1 (1987).

source_url: https://www.complex-systems.com/abstracts/v01_i01_a10/
source_author: Complex Systems journal (publisher's own site, hosted by Wolfram)
source_date: page undated but is the permanent abstract page for the article
exact_quote: page confirms "Volume 1, Issue 1" and lists title "Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text" with authors "Terrence J. Sejnowski and Charles R. Rosenberg"; PDF download link resolves to https://content.wolfram.com/sites/13/2018/02/01-1-10.pdf
source_tier: 1 (publisher's own journal site; this is the primary venue of record, though the year "1987" itself is corroborated below rather than printed as bare text on this abstract page)
claim_type: quantitative (date) — Tier 1-2 required, met via publisher site + corroboration below

Corroborating exact-quote (from search-engine indexing of the primary PDF text itself, two independent host copies of the same PDF):

exact_quote: "Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168 Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce" (appears identically as the indexed title/snippet for both of the URLs below, consistent with this being the paper's own printed running header)
source_url (copy 1): https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Parallel%20Networks%20That%20Learn%20to%20Pronounce%20English%20Text%201987-3351.pdf (Sejnowski's own lab archive, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute)
source_url (copy 2): https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Teaching/CS340-Fall07/reading/nettalk.pdf (UBC CS teaching archive, scanned copy of the same article)
source_tier: 2 (primary-document text, but surfaced via search-index snippet rather than a direct read by this agent — see tooling caveat above)

Claim: The page range is 145–168

Both independent PDF-host copies' indexed text give the same page range, matching the standard bibliographic citation for this paper.

exact_quote: "Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168 Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce" (same snippet as above; page numbers 145 and 168 appear as the volume's start/end pages for this article)
source_url: https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Parallel%20Networks%20That%20Learn%20to%20Pronounce%20English%20Text%201987-3351.pdf
source_author: Terrence J. Sejnowski, Charles R. Rosenberg (paper itself, via Salk CNL archive)
source_date: 1987
source_tier: 2 (see tooling caveat)
claim_type: quantitative (page range) — Tier 1-2 required, met per above with the caveat noted

Wikipedia's article on NETtalk independently states the same figures in its reference list, giving a Tier 3-4 secondary corroboration (definitional/historical-adjacent, not load-bearing on its own but consistent):

exact_quote: "Sejnowski, Terrence J., and Charles R. Rosenberg. "Parallel networks that learn to pronounce English text." Complex systems 1.1 (1987): 145-168."
source_url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NETtalk_(artificial_neural_network)
source_tier: 3-4 (encyclopedia secondary source; used only as corroboration, not as the load-bearing citation for the number)

Claim: "NETtalk" names more than one document — the 1987 Complex Systems article is distinct from an earlier 1986 technical report and its 1988 reprint

Sejnowski and Rosenberg first circulated NETtalk as a Johns Hopkins University EECS technical report in 1986, titled "NETtalk: a parallel network that learns to read aloud" (JHU/EECS-86/01), which was later reprinted in 1988 in the edited volume Neurocomputing, Volume 1: Foundations of Research (MIT Press). This is a different document from the 1987 Complex Systems journal article ("Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text," 145-168) that is the primary target of this capture and the one most commonly cited as "the NETtalk paper" in the backpropagation-history literature. The two are easy to conflate because they share the "NETtalk" name and overlapping authorship/content.

exact_quote: "(1986) Terrence J. Sejnowski and Charles R. Rosenberg, NETtalk: a parallel network that learns to read aloud, The Johns Hopkins University Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Technical Report JHU/EECS-86/01, 32 pp."
source_url: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5431/chapter/3958546/1986-Terrence-J-Sejnowski-and-Charles-R-Rosenberg
source_author: MIT Press (Neurocomputing, Vol. 1: Foundations of Research, edited volume gateway page)
source_date: chapter reprint dated 1988 in the edited volume; original tech report dated 1986
source_tier: 2 (publisher's own book-gateway page, listing the primary bibliographic record of the reprinted chapter)
claim_type: historical/bibliographic (uncontested) — Tier 3-4 floor applies and is exceeded here

Further leads

The 1987 Complex Systems abstract page lists the direct PDF at https://content.wolfram.com/sites/13/2018/02/01-1-10.pdf — retry with working PDF-extraction tooling to get a first-person primary read of the header/footer.
ScienceDirect hosts "NETspeak — A re-implementation of NETtalk" which could be useful for tracing NETtalk's reception/replication history: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0885230887900131
The 1986 JHU technical report JHU/EECS-86/01 (32 pp.) is the earliest NETtalk document and may be relevant to the broader "who first applied backprop to a practical recognition task" question this was harvested from — not yet located as a standalone PDF.
Semantic Scholar has separate paper records for the 1987 Complex Systems article and the 1988/1986 "reads aloud" piece — worth cross-checking citation counts and abstracts if disambiguating impact: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Parallel-Networks-that-Learn-to-Pronounce-English-Sejnowski-Rosenberg/de996c32045df6f7b404dda2a753b6a9becf3c08

Source

Tier 1-2 (see per-claim notes; primary PDF text could not be directly rendered in this environment — see caveat) Terrence J. Sejnowski, Charles R. Rosenberg 1987

https://www.complex-systems.com/abstracts/v01_i01_a10/

· batch run 2026-07-09 · raw markdown