[HN Gopher] Chimpanzees have diverse vocal sequences with ordere...
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Chimpanzees have diverse vocal sequences with ordered
recombinatorial properties
Author : pueblito
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-05-24 13:57 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.researchgate.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.researchgate.net)
| grecy wrote:
| 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
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Focusing on the structure of vocal sequences, we analysed 4826
| recordings of 46 wild adult chimpanzees from Tai 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| that sounds like a dope idea..
| silencedogood3 wrote:
| Has anyone tried training a language model on animal
| vocalizations?
| prometheus76 wrote:
| There was some research on prairie dog language as well:
|
| https://medium.com/health-and-biological-research-news/prair...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov...
|
| Original paper: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003
| 347205801174?via%3Dihub
| shakezula wrote:
| 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
| jawarner wrote:
| 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
| pueblito wrote:
| To somewhat overstate this paper, it shows chimpanzees have their
| own language and communicate vocally using words
| artifact_44 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't think it's implausible. I think it's _more_
| implausible that human language is unique
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I do not doubt that deep learning can discover
| correlations that go unnoticed by humans, and if our
| failure to detect the level of language skills we possess
| in chimpanzees (and the failure of chimpanzees to detect
| those skills in humans!) is due to the sort of
| difficulties you raise, then I agree that machine
| learning could find the evidence that we have not. What I
| do doubt, however, is that these difficulties actually
| exist to the level required for us to miss what is going
| on.
|
| I believe that the theory of evolution is correct, and
| therefore that the evolution of language confers a
| differential fitness, yet chimpanzees are clearly not
| behaving in a way that exploits anything like the full
| capabilities of a human-like language, either in
| interactions between the members of their own species, or
| with their adversaries such as leopards or humans. At any
| time in the past, a small cabal of language-wielding
| chimpanzees, who grasped something more of the
| capabilities of their language skills than did their
| neighbors, could have dominated the remainder, increasing
| both their fitness and that of their species. In
| practice, we do not even observe them chatting.
|
| It was David Brin, I believe, who made the same point
| with respect to dolphins: if they have these language
| skills, how come the knowledge of the dangers presented
| by purse seine nets, and the means to avoid them, has not
| spread within those dolphin communities where these nets
| are a significant cause of mortality?
|
| There are many cases in evolution where a feature evolved
| for one purpose but then served another (which is how, it
| is supposed, birds got their flight feathers) - but even
| if that was the case for chimpanzee language, what was
| that primary purpose and why have the abilities not been
| adopted for their secondary purpose - especially as, once
| you have that level of language skills, change occurs at
| the rate of meme spread, rather than that of genes.
|
| In other words, the combination of human-like language
| skills and the chimpanzee lifestyle seems very far from
| equilibrium. Language, by its very nature, does not
| deliver its evolutionary benefits cryptically.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > AI detecting race from X-rays
|
| Anthropologists have been doing that from skeletons for
| centuries.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Hmm. Do you think you could do the same with human
| languages?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| What if chimps mainly gossip? How's that going to show up
| in the videos?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| 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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Are they words or phonemes?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Somewhere in between? It seems that individual sounds are
| perceived by the chimps as meaningful signals, and that the
| combined bigrams and trigrams have additional meanings. Not
| sure it can be analogized to human speech more specifically
| than that.
| winnit wrote:
| 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.
| vkazanov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is not superhard. It's not even hard. Every native
| speaker learned it easily ;)
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Languages that use complex systems of conjugation and
| declension don't need to rely on word order as much to
| denote relationships between the words. In normal speaking,
| subject-verb-object order might still be used, but in
| writing, there's a lot of flexibility.
| [deleted]
| biorach wrote:
| what your saying is true of most highly-inflected languages
| hosh wrote:
| It's been shown that border collies are able to understand
| novel reordering to a limited degree. They are supposed to be
| as smart as five-year olds. And watching my 18-month old son
| and similar toddlers interact in the world, such reordering
| is something is learned well before five years old.
|
| Compare to parrot and corvids. Birds have evolved a brain
| more efficient than humans. Crows are able to work with
| abstractions, and pound-for-pound use less brain matter.
|
| And then there's the octopus and other cephelopods.
| briga wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31233473
| calibas wrote:
| Just don't call it "language" or the human exceptionalists will
| get very upset.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Cultural value inherited from the past, mankind holding
| dominion over all others on earth.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Chimps have culture:
| 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 wrote:
| I didn't assert it was a virtue. I asserted that is why,
| and why we continue to assume human exceptionalism.
|
| In a different comment, I was talking about dogs, birds,
| cephelopods being more intelligent than we typically give
| them credit for.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Jokes on them I think the proteins and electrical signals
| through which multi-cellular organisms interact is a language.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I do not have any strong objection to it being called language,
| so long as that does not slide into "...just like we do." I
| take it as quite clear that the language of chimpanzees is
| qualitatively less powerful, in terms of its ability to express
| and communicate ideas, than that of humans - their behavior
| amongst themselves, and in their interactions with humans,
| would surely be very different if it were (if they have
| language and they understand language, why are they not using
| it in situations where it would be clear, to any individual
| with that knowledge, how useful it would be?)
|
| On the other hand, I feel it is highly likely that other, now
| extinct, homo species had human-like language skills. Language
| evolved, and it is not very plausible that it did so in one
| leap from that which we see in other species today. Some level
| of language and other cognitive skills are to be expected in
| other species, and the study of those skills is both worthwhile
| in itself and as a guide to better understanding ourselves.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Is it bad to think humans are exceptional? It seems when you
| look at the world that we stand out quite a bit. You could
| argue the only difference between humans and certain animals is
| that of degree (of cognitive ability, consciousness, intellect,
| etc) but it still seems like humans stand out, there is a large
| degree of difference especially in the effect.
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