7 ms·

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