3 ms·

The article doesn't really say it, but do we have any method of translating what the dolphins are saying? Or do we just know that they are communicating?

ZenoArrow 10y ago
From the article... "The next step, Ryabov said, is creating dolphin translators so we can have conversations with them."
- xg15 10y ago
  I was pretty puzzled by that line. Going from "we think those sequences of acoustic signals might possibly consist come kind of language" to "let#s build a translator" seems a pretty big leap to me. Shouldn't you actually learn the language first? In this case, we neither know how the language encodes mental concepts, now what kinds of mental concepts dolphins would even possibly use.
  - goldfeld 10y ago
    Surely we can start with basic emotions? Affection, gratitude, rage, cruelty/spite, tranquility, fear, bitterness, rejection, confusion, kindness are all mind states mammals or at least the smarter ones seem capable to express and maybe put into words.
  - visarga 10y ago
    It's hard to do that with human hearing, but we can use neural networks to model the sound of their conversations and build a language model. The purpose of a language model is to predict the next sound based on the past. If it learns to do this precisely enough, then we have access to a transcription from "dolphin audio" to word vector representations. Then we need to match those word vectors to concepts based on observing how they correlate to their actions.
    - xg15 10y ago
      I agree building a language model would be the first step - and we need to apply some mapping to outside observations if we want to assign some meaning to the model. But especially the last step seems hard to me. Humans often do one thing and talk about something completely different at the same time. Even if their actions and conversation are related, you usually try to avoid redundancy and will talk about things that the recipient can not already infer from your body language and/or actions. This would make correlation hard for human languages. I don't see any rrason to believe that dolphins are any nicer in that regard. What I found more promising was a controlled experiment performed a time ago, where pairs of dolphins were trained to think up and perform a choreography. At some point, the dolphins would have to coordinate how to swim - and researchers were apparently able to pinpoint some particular "conversations" that looked like they were just that. So you might have some better chances to analyze those conversations because you can make concrete assumptions about their content. Still, even then you're kind of behaving like an alien that tries to learn both "the culture of humans" and the complete english language at the same time - by observing a handful of soccer games.
      - visarga 10y ago
        Then we could identify concepts in those conversations and play them out on a speaker, to see if they do what we thought the sound means.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  I look forward to discover what another specie might have to say. Its a first encounter type of scenario in our own backyard.
  - mseri 10y ago
    There is the gorilla also, I cannot remember her name right now
    - asimuvPR 10y ago
      I think it was koko or something similar. It used sign language. Its going to be fascinating to compare "speech" from one specie to hand signals from another.
      - mseri 10y ago
        Yes, it was Koko, thanks! I think she understood a reasonable number of words and concepts, arriving to "talk" about her feelings towards death. It's going to be really interesting if we can really start understanding and talking to more animals, also to understand how much they are self-conscious
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    Probably something like "stop ruining our planet".

ZenoArrow 10y ago

From the article... "The next step, Ryabov said, is creating dolphin translators so we can have conversations with them."

xg15 10y ago
I was pretty puzzled by that line. Going from "we think those sequences of acoustic signals might possibly consist come kind of language" to "let#s build a translator" seems a pretty big leap to me. Shouldn't you actually learn the language first? In this case, we neither know how the language encodes mental concepts, now what kinds of mental concepts dolphins would even possibly use.
- goldfeld 10y ago
  Surely we can start with basic emotions? Affection, gratitude, rage, cruelty/spite, tranquility, fear, bitterness, rejection, confusion, kindness are all mind states mammals or at least the smarter ones seem capable to express and maybe put into words.
- visarga 10y ago
  It's hard to do that with human hearing, but we can use neural networks to model the sound of their conversations and build a language model. The purpose of a language model is to predict the next sound based on the past. If it learns to do this precisely enough, then we have access to a transcription from "dolphin audio" to word vector representations. Then we need to match those word vectors to concepts based on observing how they correlate to their actions.
  - xg15 10y ago
    I agree building a language model would be the first step - and we need to apply some mapping to outside observations if we want to assign some meaning to the model. But especially the last step seems hard to me. Humans often do one thing and talk about something completely different at the same time. Even if their actions and conversation are related, you usually try to avoid redundancy and will talk about things that the recipient can not already infer from your body language and/or actions. This would make correlation hard for human languages. I don't see any rrason to believe that dolphins are any nicer in that regard. What I found more promising was a controlled experiment performed a time ago, where pairs of dolphins were trained to think up and perform a choreography. At some point, the dolphins would have to coordinate how to swim - and researchers were apparently able to pinpoint some particular "conversations" that looked like they were just that. So you might have some better chances to analyze those conversations because you can make concrete assumptions about their content. Still, even then you're kind of behaving like an alien that tries to learn both "the culture of humans" and the complete english language at the same time - by observing a handful of soccer games.
    - visarga 10y ago
      Then we could identify concepts in those conversations and play them out on a speaker, to see if they do what we thought the sound means.
asimuvPR 10y ago
I look forward to discover what another specie might have to say. Its a first encounter type of scenario in our own backyard.
- mseri 10y ago
  There is the gorilla also, I cannot remember her name right now
  - asimuvPR 10y ago
    I think it was koko or something similar. It used sign language. Its going to be fascinating to compare "speech" from one specie to hand signals from another.
    - mseri 10y ago
      Yes, it was Koko, thanks! I think she understood a reasonable number of words and concepts, arriving to "talk" about her feelings towards death. It's going to be really interesting if we can really start understanding and talking to more animals, also to understand how much they are self-conscious
- DougWebb 10y ago
  Probably something like "stop ruining our planet".