
Bat chat: machine learning algorithms provide translations for bat squeaks - never-the-bride
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/dec/22/bat-chat-machine-learning-algorithms-provide-translations-for-bat-squeaks
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max_
Reminds me of Google translate for animals. :)

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I24bSteJpw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I24bSteJpw)

[0][https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals...](https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/)

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djrogers
I wonder if it would be possible to do something similar with dogs, or are
their vocabularies too varied and influenced by environment?

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jbuzbee
They've already done it for dogs:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/FarsideDogTranslat...](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/FarsideDogTranslator.jpg)

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gm-conspiracy
Also, this from early 2000s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BowLingual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BowLingual)

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tastythrowaway2
can we get one of these for babies please? or does unky herb still have the
patent on that?

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mrfusion
Is anyone trying this with dolphins?

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seaQuest
I heard that an officer by the name of Captain Nathan Bridger, of the The
United Earth Oceans Organization, is conducting an animal protocol on board
his vessel.

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rch
Reminded me of a line from the HMMER manual:

"HMMER3 has already been used to model mouse song [Elena Rivas, personal
communication]"

\--
[http://eddylab.org/software/hmmer3/3.1b2/Userguide.pdf](http://eddylab.org/software/hmmer3/3.1b2/Userguide.pdf)
(page 10)

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mankash666
Unleashing auto learning AI on lost languages (Egyptian hieroglyphics, Indus
valley civilization glyphs, etc ) should yield breakthroughs. Or so I think

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acqq
1) You have to train the machine with the known solutions. From the article:

"The team spent 75 days continuously recording both audio and video footage of
22 bats that were split into two groups and housed in separate cages. By
studying the video footage, the researchers were able to unpick which bats
were arguing each other, the outcome of each row, and sort the squabbles into
four different bones of contention: sleep, food, perching position and
unwanted mating attempts.

The team then trained the machine learning algorithm with around 15,000 bat
calls from seven adult females, each categorised using information gleaned
from the video footage, before testing the system’s accuracy."

2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_Egyptian_hiero...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_Egyptian_hieroglyphs)

"The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was gradually achieved during the
early 19th century."

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ge96
Unwanted mating attempts haha

Ayyeee

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adeptus
I was expecting the AI to reveal for the first time what the bats were saying,
instead we learn that AI significantly under-performed what humans already
understood about bat communications. Why is this even relevant? Also
understanding 61% of the times what the animals were talking about is pretty
close to a coin toss. Not impressed -!?

"The results revealed that, based only on the frequencies within the bats’
calls, the algorithm correctly identified the bat making the call around 71%
of the time, and what the animals were squabbling about around 61% of the
time."

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lukas
I'm not sure that the AI significantly under-performed humans. It looks to me
like the labels that the accuracy number came from were labeled by watching
video of the bats. The 61% understanding number was off of 7 possible topics
and averaged over each topic so it's definitely better than guessing. I
suspect there's a fair amount of ambiguity and mislabeling in these "topics"
from humans trying to interpret bat motivations so 100% accuracy probably
isn't really feasible.

I have no idea what the state of the art is in bat understanding but the
results seems really impressive to me - maybe I'm easily impressed? :)

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vr46
Next: teenagers

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adeptus
Ultimate goal: Decipher what women really mean when they speak.

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kahrkunne
Thought of the day: what does the fact that this is being downvoted but the
parent is not say about our culture?

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kobeya
That we're not mysogynistic? Yay!

