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Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

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Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, lets get an LLM to translate one of not understood human languages first. You can do both. Models trained to receive and predict audio tokens alongside text are coming. You could just add such data as part of training. >Does that get us any closer to translating it. NO, because without shared context to start building connections and relationships its highly unlikely that were going to find commonality. If you…

the sounds for man, and the word man can be mapped. The concept of man can be mapped from English to Chinese. Given enough of these clues, and a large enough data set it's not shocking that models get decent at inference between languages. But whales? What we are (probably) proposing is putting two languages side by side with NO context and saying "figure it out". Here is a great example of people and language and pe…

>the sounds for man, and the word man can be mapped. The concept of man can be mapped from English to Chinese. Given enough of these clues, and a large enough data set it's not shocking that models get decent at inference between languages.

1. Many such concepts cannot be directly mapped between different languages especially with distant language pairs.

2. Language Models and Image models even if both are only trained on their respective modality learn structural representations so similar, you can connect them with a simple linear layer. That's it. Entirely different modalities https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.15162

https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08485

I think you are severely underestimating the extent to which representations can group in neural networks.

They're mammals, they're social animals, they see. You're assuming a level of alienness we don't have the knowledge or understanding to truly ascertain.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not understood human languages are in general languages with a low amount of source material.

given unrestricted compute, could an AI attempt to decipher a completely unknown language through interpreting O(n) brute iterations and reporting versions that are coherent to human heuristics?

There are uncountably many “valid” interpretations by this approach. With scant source material there is no way to verify the guessed translation as correct or not.

It’s like “guessing” the encryption key of a one-time pad.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#23
post #6
post #2

I can’t help but wonder if we were able to feed a lot of whale communications into LLMs with this new found layer of information if we would be able to translate someday.

Well, lets get an LLM to translate one of the not understood human languages first. Could we build a chat GPT for whales to use, with this approach, sure. Does that get us any closer to translating it. NO, because without shared context to start building connections and relationships its highly unlikely that were going to find commonality.

We can do this already :

https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00043

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#24
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/hph9OeKjg3w -- here's a video about this about a research effort to accomplish precisely this.

What do whales do if we "replay" their sounds?

This concept is explored in one of the episodes of Extrapolations. Fiction obviously, but interesting to think about.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the kind of task I really want to see LLMs used for - not just to replicate things humans can already do, but to explore things that humans haven’t figured out yet. Maybe we don’t know enough to pick up on the rhyme and reason of whale communication yet , but brute-forcing it with an AI seems like a great way to get a fresh perspective.

lol, one of my previous comments is similar here. nice to be validated as sane by one other person :)

By the power vested in me as a random comment from the internet, behold, I now declare you, "SANE!" Go forth, and insane no more.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#26
This headline feels slightly misleading to me. As far as I can tell, this research shows that sperm whale clicks have spectral properties which are analogous in some ways to human vowels. In particular, they exhibit formants (essentially, amplified frequency bands), and analysing them reveals that these whales produce two different kinds of clicks. While fascinating in their own right, I feel it isn’t entirely fair to call these ‘vowels and diphthongs’ without qualification: these seem to admit a lot less variation than do human vowels.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#28
post #6
post #2

I can’t help but wonder if we were able to feed a lot of whale communications into LLMs with this new found layer of information if we would be able to translate someday.

Well, lets get an LLM to translate one of the not understood human languages first. Could we build a chat GPT for whales to use, with this approach, sure. Does that get us any closer to translating it. NO, because without shared context to start building connections and relationships its highly unlikely that were going to find commonality.

a major focus of the project is to also monitor the whales' physical movement, in order to put the particular sounds in the context of actions.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#29
post #23
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, lets get an LLM to translate one of the not understood human languages first. Could we build a chat GPT for whales to use, with this approach, sure. Does that get us any closer to translating it. NO, because without shared context to start building connections and relationships its highly unlikely that were going to find commonality.

We can do this already : https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00043

The technique in that paper, is likely not generalizable.

It works for EN/FR, less well for EN/DE... because English has a huge overlap with these two (more French than German) for its word by word translation. With something like Chinese, and enough time it might be able to guess its way in due to overlaps in the training data.

If you took two completely random corpus's from two languages, and jammed them into this model and handed that system to someone who only knew one language, the approach would fall flat on its face.

Re: Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales

#30
post #2

I can’t help but wonder if we were able to feed a lot of whale communications into LLMs with this new found layer of information if we would be able to translate someday.

I mean since the glorified autocomplete bots we call LLMs can't actually understand language, all we have to do is get enough samples of whale language and they can easily communicate with them.
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