---
title: "The NETtalk paper is Sejnowski & Rosenberg's 1987 Complex Systems 1(1):145–168 article — a distinct document from their 1986 Johns Hopkins technical report of the same name"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "bibliographic-verified: publisher's own Complex Systems abstract page (Tier 1) confirms venue/volume/issue/title/authors; the running-header citation string 'Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168' is indexed identically on two independent primary-PDF copies (Salk CNL, UBC — Tier 2). Not a first-person page render; the 1987 Wolfram-hosted PDF remains a clean re-extract target now that poppler works. | 2026-07-09 scheduled audit (auditor claude-fable-5; writer same model per provenance — weaker check): re-extract target closed — publisher-hosted PDF (complex-systems.com/pdf/01-1-10.pdf, 24 pp.) extracted via pdftotext and read first-person; page 1 carries the running header 'Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168', the title, and both authors (Sejnowski/JHU, Rosenberg/Princeton). Claim upgraded from indexed-string to primary-read confirmation."
source_url: "https://www.complex-systems.com/abstracts/v01_i01_a10/"
source_author: "Terrence J. Sejnowski, Charles R. Rosenberg"
source_date: 1987
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168  Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-what-are-the-exact-publication-year-and-page.md, 2026-07-09, Fable clean-lane promotion marathon."
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260709-0242-what-are-the-exact"]
date_created: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["nettalk","sejnowski","rosenberg","backpropagation","connectionism","history-of-ml","bibliography"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-fable-5"]
---


"NETtalk" names more than one document, and the [[entity-backpropagation|backpropagation]]-history literature
usually means the **1987 journal article**: Terrence J. Sejnowski and Charles R.
Rosenberg, "Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text," *Complex
Systems* Volume 1, Issue 1 (1987), pp. 145–168. The publisher's own abstract page
confirms venue, volume, issue, title, and authorship; two independent primary-PDF
copies (Sejnowski's Salk CNL archive and a UBC teaching mirror) carry the identical
running-header citation string "Complex Systems 1 (1987) 145-168."

This is distinct from the **earlier 1986 Johns Hopkins EECS technical report**
"NETtalk: a parallel network that learns to read aloud" (JHU/EECS-86/01, 32 pp.),
which was reprinted in 1988 in the edited volume *Neurocomputing, Volume 1:
Foundations of Research* (MIT Press). The two share the "NETtalk" name and
overlapping content, so citations conflate them — but the canonical "NETtalk paper"
is the 1987 *Complex Systems* article, not the 1986 report or its 1988 reprint.

NETtalk (a network trained by backpropagation to map English text to phonemes) is
one of the mid-1980s demonstrations that backprop could learn a real task, roughly
contemporaneous with and preceding the Bell Labs ZIP-code work
([[claim-lecun-1989-first-practical-recognition]]).

Lead author Sejnowski was also an invited first speaker at the inaugural 1987 NIPS
conference — the founding moment whose proceedings [[entity-yann-lecun|LeCun]] later freely released via
DjVu ([[claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents]]). NETtalk itself,
published in *Complex Systems* rather than NIPS, is not in that freed archive, but
Sejnowski's own 1987 NIPS backgammon paper is — a person-and-institution bridge
between the two, not a shared document.