Language requires a prior shared context. Communication is then optimized around relationships between those concepts. Without situational context, we might not

Language requires a prior shared context. Communication is then optimized around relationships between those concepts. Without situational context, we might not ever determine the "meaning" for a lot of animal language. But we can still likely understand the relationships between different expressions, which may be of some use within itself to at least establish an emotional baseline for some expressions. There are already research groups who have been attempting to use embeddings and transformers to build out a vector space of specific animal languages. I think they will find some success and improve our current understanding, the question is how much context we will be able to derive. It's possible for example, that end-to-end multimodal AI would be able to train not just on animal sounds, but the body language and environmental and situational context they are in via video and other captured environmental data.