AI Could One Day Help Us Understand Whale, Dolphin, and Other Animal Languages

The whale song is soothing and ethereal, and much more complex than we thought. Take a recent example – earlier this year, an international team of researchers discovered that bump calls contained structures of the language type remarkably similar to ours.

It turns out that, like human language, whale song contains recurring segments, which appear in models that seem to make them easier to learn. For example, extracts that occurred more frequently had tend to be shorter.

It must be said that the songs themselves do not resemble the language in the way we understand it. It is not yet clear if these vocalizations transfer the meaning, for example, or can be more compared to music, which also contains recurring segments.

But this suggests that we share certain key characteristics of language with other animals that also learn via cultural transmission, or information transmitted from one individual to another. It also reveals animal communication models which could one day be interpreted and help improve our understanding of the inner life of other species.

What is language?

Language is not just a word or sound associated with specific meaning. It is a complex system that allows us to transform a relatively small number of sounds (phonemes) into words, sentences and sentences which, in turn, allow us to transmit an almost infinite range of meanings. This is the difference between your pet Labrador associating the word “Walkies” with a certain activity and engaging in a heated debate on where to spend the holidays.

It was formerly thought that the language was unique to humans, but the article on humpback songs is only an example in an increasing whole of research highlighting the complexity of animal communication.

In two studies published this year, researchers have shown that bonobos and chimpanzees demonstrate a compositionality capacity. This means that they can combine different calls to transmit a range of meanings, just as we do when we combine words to make sentences.

A similar capacity for composition syntax has been identified in birds, in particular the great Japanese chick. In other studies, scientists have shown that Meerkats exchange calls with their peers, dolphins and elephants have individual “names” and sperm have something not different from the phonetic alphabet.

Crack the code

This raises the question: if animal vocalizations display certain similar models (if not directly comparable), is it possible to determine what they say?

There are incentives to anyone can break the code, paste it Dolittle Challenge offering a capital investment of $ 10 million or $ 100,000 in cash for the land. Meanwhile, the proliferation of automatic learning models opens up the possibility of scanning large sets of audio and visual signal data in order to detect models that could mean specific meaning.

Google Dolphingemma is an example. Developed with the Wild Dolphin Project and the Georgia Institute of Technology, it aims to interpret the clicks and whistles of the dolphins to the point where it may be possible to produce a realistic response. The Earth Espèmes project is another. The team aims to understand the communication of species through the animal kingdom using the first audio language model for bioacoustics.

Elsewhere, AI is used to support research on animal communication. Laela Sayigh de The Woods Hole Institution Oceanographic used AI to cover decades of data on the vocalizations of dolphins, note that 50% of the whistles did not refer to an individual dolphin. (The document is currently in preparation.) Meanwhile, the discovery of a “phonetic alphabet” in sperm involved algorithms for the recognition of complex patterns.

The AI ​​is still in its infancy – so look (or rather listen) this space.

Learn more: Bonobos communicate like humans, at least when it comes to combining calls

Article Sources:

Our Discovermagazine.com writers use studies evaluated by high -quality peers and sources for our articles, and our publishers examine scientific precision and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• Science, the songs of whales shows a statistical structure of the language type
• Scientific progress, the versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promote the expansion of meaning
• Science, extended compositionality in the vocal system of Bonobos
• Nature communications, experimental evidence of the syntax of composition in bird calls
• The PNA, the signing whistle shape, the bikes, identify the information on the dolphins of the bottles
• Ecology and evolution of nature, African elephants are aimed at each other with individually specific names
• Animal behavior, call concatenation in wild mere
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• Biorxiv, first proof of generalized sharing of the types of whistles not reported stereotypical by wild dolphins
• Jeremy Paste Foundation, the researchers awarded $ 100,000 for identifying the first proof of possible linguistic communication among dolphins