13 ms·

Chimpanzees have diverse vocal sequences with ordered recombinatorial properties

111 points by pueblito 4y ago

pueblito 4y ago
To somewhat overstate this paper, it shows chimpanzees have their own language and communicate vocally using words
- artifact_44 4y ago
  Do you know of any projects using automated transcription and machine learning to analyze hominid speech? I ask because I remember reading about google translate effectively learning how to translate languages purely through machine learning and a large corpus of transcribed speech.
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    Sure. Do you have a large corpus of chimp to human? And it's not like both of these sides don't have an almost endless variety of languages...
    - hackinthebochs 4y ago
      What we need is a large corpus of vocal recordings along with contextual video recording. Then train a model to associate vocalizations with states of the video by predicting subsequent video frames. By throwing enough compute at the problem we could probably come to understand any animal language with such a technique.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        What if chimps mainly gossip? How's that going to show up in the videos?
        hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I expect there's a hierarchy in language acquisition, where describing interactions with the world come before more abstract talk such as gossip. But once this first-order descriptive talk is understood, this can be leveraged to capture the more abstract talk.
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        Looking at correlations between vocalizations and behavior is one thing primate researchers have been doing for decades. It seems implausible for there to be a large skill set that has so far escaped their notice. Whenever one group of humans has met another, it has rapidly become apparent to both parties that the other has a language, no matter how long the ancestors of the two groups have been isolated from one another. Given how long humans and chimpanzees have been coexisting, if they had comparably effective language skills, it is implausible that either party has not recognized it in the other.
        circlefavshape 4y ago
        I don't think it's implausible. I think it's more implausible that human language is unique
        mannykannot 4y ago
        The view I set out here is neither predicated on nor entails the position that human language is unique. In fact, I happen to believe that there have been several species on Earth with human-like language, it's just that the others are now extinct. I also think it far more likely than not that there is language-using life elsewhere in the universe.
        hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I think its been conclusively demonstrated that deep learning can discover correlations that go unnoticed by humans. An example that immediately comes to mind is AI detecting race from X-rays. There are many others. There's also many other factors that influence our ability to ascribe language skills to other groups of humans, from complexity of vocalizations to similar ways to interact with the environment and with other group members. We recognize ourselves in fellow humans, which makes it easy to ascribe similar capacities. The question is how easily can we recognize language in a species where we do not immediately recognize ourselves? The more foreign the behavior and the patterns of communication, the harder it gets. AI has the ability to elide over those difficulties.
      - circlefavshape 4y ago
        Hmm. Do you think you could do the same with human languages?
        hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I think so. It's similar to how an adult can learn a new language by way of immersion. Correlations and gesturing go a long way.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  It seems a little more than that even. I mean, I admit I couldn't quite follow all of it, but it seems to be suggesting that chimps can to a degree create reorderings of their 'words' to make new meanings, in a sort of proto-syntax. After all, if human language is expressive because our abilities to use syntax and grammar to make complex meaning. Those things had to be built on something that came before.
  - winnit 4y ago
    It's interesting because I've heard that one of the benefits Sanskrit poets had in their ability to introduce complex structural patterns in their poetry, is that the meaning of sentences is largely independent of their word-order - meaning the lines can be reordered to freely introduce rhyming schemes etc. Yet the language has many grammatical elements; gendered word endings and so on.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - vkazanov 4y ago
      This kind of relaxed word order is also typical for modern Baltic and Slavic languages. Words themselves have enough information encoded in word prefixes/suffixes/endings so that it's possible to decode even a randomly mixed up sentence. It will feel awkward, or stylistically wrong, but nevertheless understandable. This might help with poetry but comes at a price: it is superhard to internalise all the numerous word forms. I can't image learning Polish, Lithuanian or Russian being only exposed to English previously!
      - dragandj 4y ago
        It is not superhard. It’s not even hard. Every native speaker learned it easily ;)
      - kazinator 4y ago
        > It will feel awkward, or stylistically wrong. No it won't, because it's understood to be poetic. In English, it's a awkward if an adjective is put after a noun right? But you don't bat an eyelash if it's in a poem. "High upon the chimney stack, there I saw perched three crows black." (Don't search for that, I just made it up.) Moreover, in languages with case, reordering doesn't cause any ambiguities or confusion. You know which word is the subject and which the object in any permutation. (Not necessarily for all words, but most.) The speakers already enjoy considerable reordering freedom in everyday sentences already (non-poetic) where it plays roles in emphasis and such.
silencedogood3 4y ago
Has anyone tried training a language model on animal vocalizations?
- jawarner 4y ago
  Not a language model, but there was this classifier mapping pig squeals to contextual information about the animal [1]. For human language models there are obvious practical uses and we can intuitively evaluate the quality of the models. For animal communication you need to use other biological variables, like valence in the pig communication example. I do remember one where they generated artificial frog mating calls and were able to generate artificial ones that were exceptionally attractive to female frogs, but that was from a while back, and I can’t find the link. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
- shakezula 4y ago
  There was a post here on HN a few months back about a group of scientists that did exactly that to whale recordings, and actually found some surprising patterns emerge. edit: I think this is the one I was thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874309
- prometheus76 4y ago
  There was some research on prairie dog language as well: https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prairie-dog-chatter-the-science-behind-a-new-language-9144ace4114f https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prair... https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov... Original paper: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347205801174?via%3Dihub
briga 4y ago
Has similar research been done on bird song? It seems to me that bird song could also be described as ordered recombinatorial sequences, for instance the mockingbird takes the sounds of other birds and strings them together to create new songs.
- noworld 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31233473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31233473
- gs17 4y ago
  I'm curious about mockingbirds as well, they appear to have a separate set of vocalizations for interacting directly with each other in addition to their imitated songs. I always assumed the mocking was to claim territory as every species at once, but it seems to not have a well established explanation.
calibas 4y ago
Just don't call it "language" or the human exceptionalists will get very upset.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Just don't call it "language" or the human exceptionalists will get very upset We don't know what "language" is. This is an attempt to empirically construct that definition from the bottom up. Calling it "language" may saddle whatever's going on here with needless or even misleading assumptions.
  - calibas 4y ago
    Language is a word we invented to describe a certain category of things. It's not some big mystery, there's not some objective, universal meaning that we have yet to discover. By the broadest definitions, chimpanzees have a language, and maybe even multiple dialects. By the narrowest definitions, only humans have languages. People behave like there's some profound truth here, but this is really just semantics. I don't see why it's such a touchy subject, other than the fact that people like to believe humans are a special case.
    - hosh 4y ago
      Cultural value inherited from the past, mankind holding dominion over all others on earth.
      - actually_a_dog 4y ago
        Chimps have culture: https://www.nature.com/articles/050815-12 https://www.nature.com/articles/050815-12 As for "dominion over the earth," we're in the process right now of finding out exactly how fragile our hold over the planet is. I would not be asserting "dominion over the earth" as some kind of virtue at this point.
        hosh 4y ago
robonerd 4y ago
> Focusing on the structure of vocal sequences, we analysed 4826 recordings of 46 wild adult chimpanzees from Taï National Park. If this same analysis were conducted with other populations of chimpanzees as well, could it be determined whether different populations use different languages? I believe this sort of thing has been tried with Orcas, with the conclusion that different populations have different languages.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  I think them using different languages should be the assumption. No two individuals ever have an exact same accent so over time languages change and chimps don’t have large macro-societies (states) to standardize language.
hosh 4y ago
Does that mean we can use one of those AI language models and develop a way to translate what the chimpanzees are communicating to each other?
- flukeshott 4y ago
  that sounds like a dope idea..
- ilaksh 4y ago
  The AI language models are based on reference translations that cannot exist in this case unless you find a chimp that knows English and can translate all of the recordings from that study. If you repeat that enough times eventually you will get a model that can do a translation without any chimp linguists. What would be possible in a thoroughly surveilled group is to do a detailed analysis and record of the behavior and interactions and dialogues etc., possibly even eye gaze direction, and it's exact timing, and then create some type of AI model based on all of that together.
grecy 4y ago
After spending a day with Chimpanzees where they climbed all over me, played in the jungle and basically did their thing in their group, it was blatantly obvious to see the intelligence in their eyes. [1] I have no doubt they have a language with each other, we're just not smart enough to figure it out yet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfdo3s8tPUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfdo3s8tPUk

111 points by pueblito 4y ago

pueblito 4y ago

To somewhat overstate this paper, it shows chimpanzees have their own language and communicate vocally using words

artifact_44 4y ago
Do you know of any projects using automated transcription and machine learning to analyze hominid speech? I ask because I remember reading about google translate effectively learning how to translate languages purely through machine learning and a large corpus of transcribed speech.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  Sure. Do you have a large corpus of chimp to human? And it's not like both of these sides don't have an almost endless variety of languages...
  - hackinthebochs 4y ago
    What we need is a large corpus of vocal recordings along with contextual video recording. Then train a model to associate vocalizations with states of the video by predicting subsequent video frames. By throwing enough compute at the problem we could probably come to understand any animal language with such a technique.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      What if chimps mainly gossip? How's that going to show up in the videos?
      - hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I expect there's a hierarchy in language acquisition, where describing interactions with the world come before more abstract talk such as gossip. But once this first-order descriptive talk is understood, this can be leveraged to capture the more abstract talk.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      Looking at correlations between vocalizations and behavior is one thing primate researchers have been doing for decades. It seems implausible for there to be a large skill set that has so far escaped their notice. Whenever one group of humans has met another, it has rapidly become apparent to both parties that the other has a language, no matter how long the ancestors of the two groups have been isolated from one another. Given how long humans and chimpanzees have been coexisting, if they had comparably effective language skills, it is implausible that either party has not recognized it in the other.
      - circlefavshape 4y ago
        I don't think it's implausible. I think it's more implausible that human language is unique
        mannykannot 4y ago
        The view I set out here is neither predicated on nor entails the position that human language is unique. In fact, I happen to believe that there have been several species on Earth with human-like language, it's just that the others are now extinct. I also think it far more likely than not that there is language-using life elsewhere in the universe.
      - hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I think its been conclusively demonstrated that deep learning can discover correlations that go unnoticed by humans. An example that immediately comes to mind is AI detecting race from X-rays. There are many others. There's also many other factors that influence our ability to ascribe language skills to other groups of humans, from complexity of vocalizations to similar ways to interact with the environment and with other group members. We recognize ourselves in fellow humans, which makes it easy to ascribe similar capacities. The question is how easily can we recognize language in a species where we do not immediately recognize ourselves? The more foreign the behavior and the patterns of communication, the harder it gets. AI has the ability to elide over those difficulties.
    - circlefavshape 4y ago
      Hmm. Do you think you could do the same with human languages?
      - hackinthebochs 4y ago
        I think so. It's similar to how an adult can learn a new language by way of immersion. Correlations and gesturing go a long way.
Finnucane 4y ago
It seems a little more than that even. I mean, I admit I couldn't quite follow all of it, but it seems to be suggesting that chimps can to a degree create reorderings of their 'words' to make new meanings, in a sort of proto-syntax. After all, if human language is expressive because our abilities to use syntax and grammar to make complex meaning. Those things had to be built on something that came before.
- winnit 4y ago
  It's interesting because I've heard that one of the benefits Sanskrit poets had in their ability to introduce complex structural patterns in their poetry, is that the meaning of sentences is largely independent of their word-order - meaning the lines can be reordered to freely introduce rhyming schemes etc. Yet the language has many grammatical elements; gendered word endings and so on.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vkazanov 4y ago
    This kind of relaxed word order is also typical for modern Baltic and Slavic languages. Words themselves have enough information encoded in word prefixes/suffixes/endings so that it's possible to decode even a randomly mixed up sentence. It will feel awkward, or stylistically wrong, but nevertheless understandable. This might help with poetry but comes at a price: it is superhard to internalise all the numerous word forms. I can't image learning Polish, Lithuanian or Russian being only exposed to English previously!
    - dragandj 4y ago
      It is not superhard. It’s not even hard. Every native speaker learned it easily ;)
    - kazinator 4y ago
      > It will feel awkward, or stylistically wrong. No it won't, because it's understood to be poetic. In English, it's a awkward if an adjective is put after a noun right? But you don't bat an eyelash if it's in a poem. "High upon the chimney stack, there I saw perched three crows black." (Don't search for that, I just made it up.) Moreover, in languages with case, reordering doesn't cause any ambiguities or confusion. You know which word is the subject and which the object in any permutation. (Not necessarily for all words, but most.) The speakers already enjoy considerable reordering freedom in everyday sentences already (non-poetic) where it plays roles in emphasis and such.

silencedogood3 4y ago

Has anyone tried training a language model on animal vocalizations?

jawarner 4y ago
Not a language model, but there was this classifier mapping pig squeals to contextual information about the animal [1]. For human language models there are obvious practical uses and we can intuitively evaluate the quality of the models. For animal communication you need to use other biological variables, like valence in the pig communication example. I do remember one where they generated artificial frog mating calls and were able to generate artificial ones that were exceptionally attractive to female frogs, but that was from a while back, and I can’t find the link. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-07174-8
shakezula 4y ago
There was a post here on HN a few months back about a group of scientists that did exactly that to whale recordings, and actually found some surprising patterns emerge. edit: I think this is the one I was thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874309
prometheus76 4y ago
There was some research on prairie dog language as well: https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prairie-dog-chatter-the-science-behind-a-new-language-9144ace4114f https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prair... https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov... Original paper: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003347205801174?via%3Dihub

briga 4y ago

Has similar research been done on bird song? It seems to me that bird song could also be described as ordered recombinatorial sequences, for instance the mockingbird takes the sounds of other birds and strings them together to create new songs.

noworld 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31233473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31233473
gs17 4y ago
I'm curious about mockingbirds as well, they appear to have a separate set of vocalizations for interacting directly with each other in addition to their imitated songs. I always assumed the mocking was to claim territory as every species at once, but it seems to not have a well established explanation.

calibas 4y ago

Just don't call it "language" or the human exceptionalists will get very upset.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Just don't call it "language" or the human exceptionalists will get very upset We don't know what "language" is. This is an attempt to empirically construct that definition from the bottom up. Calling it "language" may saddle whatever's going on here with needless or even misleading assumptions.
- calibas 4y ago
  Language is a word we invented to describe a certain category of things. It's not some big mystery, there's not some objective, universal meaning that we have yet to discover. By the broadest definitions, chimpanzees have a language, and maybe even multiple dialects. By the narrowest definitions, only humans have languages. People behave like there's some profound truth here, but this is really just semantics. I don't see why it's such a touchy subject, other than the fact that people like to believe humans are a special case.
  - hosh 4y ago
    Cultural value inherited from the past, mankind holding dominion over all others on earth.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      Chimps have culture: https://www.nature.com/articles/050815-12 https://www.nature.com/articles/050815-12 As for "dominion over the earth," we're in the process right now of finding out exactly how fragile our hold over the planet is. I would not be asserting "dominion over the earth" as some kind of virtue at this point.
      - hosh 4y ago

robonerd 4y ago

> Focusing on the structure of vocal sequences, we analysed 4826 recordings of 46 wild adult chimpanzees from Taï National Park. If this same analysis were conducted with other populations of chimpanzees as well, could it be determined whether different populations use different languages? I believe this sort of thing has been tried with Orcas, with the conclusion that different populations have different languages.

edgyquant 4y ago
I think them using different languages should be the assumption. No two individuals ever have an exact same accent so over time languages change and chimps don’t have large macro-societies (states) to standardize language.

hosh 4y ago

Does that mean we can use one of those AI language models and develop a way to translate what the chimpanzees are communicating to each other?

flukeshott 4y ago
that sounds like a dope idea..
ilaksh 4y ago
The AI language models are based on reference translations that cannot exist in this case unless you find a chimp that knows English and can translate all of the recordings from that study. If you repeat that enough times eventually you will get a model that can do a translation without any chimp linguists. What would be possible in a thoroughly surveilled group is to do a detailed analysis and record of the behavior and interactions and dialogues etc., possibly even eye gaze direction, and it's exact timing, and then create some type of AI model based on all of that together.

grecy 4y ago

After spending a day with Chimpanzees where they climbed all over me, played in the jungle and basically did their thing in their group, it was blatantly obvious to see the intelligence in their eyes. [1] I have no doubt they have a language with each other, we're just not smart enough to figure it out yet. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfdo3s8tPUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfdo3s8tPUk