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I don't know anything about animal (verbal) language. But I'm curious if there are any animals whose apparent language is advanced enough that zoologists may be
by newobj 10y ago
I don't know anything about animal (verbal) language. But I'm curious if there are any animals whose apparent language is advanced enough that zoologists may believe that the animals have a conceptual language similar to ours.
If so, I wonder if ML algorithms have ever been applied to decode the languages? I suppose collecting the data may be hard, but it feels like ML may better suited to predict/decode the language than qualitative observations by humans? e.g. what if communication happened more via power than frequency?
- trhway 10y agoGoogle the prairie dogs language observations.
- KingMob 10y agoUnfortunately, Dr. Slobodchikoff, while indeed having a PhD, is not actually a linguist, and most of his papers are in other fields. Here's a pretty good assessment of his prairie dog claims: https://badlinguistics.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/hold-the-front-page-prairie-dogs-still-dont-h/ https://badlinguistics.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/hold-the-fro...
- KingMob 10y agoSadly, we've never found anything that proves animal communications have grammar. Or in information-theoretic terms, these are low entropy messages. They are instinctive things, like a hard-wired set of warning cries, or "write-once", like how male songbirds learn their species song during puberty, and will produce it identically forever, once stabilized (even if they go deaf!)
- kainolophobia 10y agoThis article provides an interesting overview of Zipf's law and how it applies to dolphins [0] (and the associated HN thread [1]) [0]http://nautil.us/blog/dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-aliens http://nautil.us/blog/dolphins-are-helping-us-hunt-for-alien... [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515108