Do you really know how whales communicate ? These marine mammals have developed an efficient way of communicating in the water using complex sounds, allowing them a sense of orientation and a way to identify dangerous objects and potentials through hiss or high-frequency sounds.
To find out what these animals transmit, a group of scientists belonging to the CETI (Cetacean Translational Initiative) project has begun to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand the language of these mammals , especially sperm whales.
What technology has been used?
This idea can be achieved thanks to natural language processing (NLP), which is defined as a subfield of AI that is focused on the processing of written and spoken language. To do this, the researchers have already applied the sperm whale recordings to an NLP algorithm.
For now, the first objective of the project is to collect 4,000 million codas to later contextualize this language . It is also important to note that scientists have collected 100,000 codas thanks to the work ‘Dominica Sperm Whale Project’, which could facilitate the research process.
To decipher the message , all the codas will need to be processed so that they have a specific meaning within the language that sperm whales use to communicate.
It is important to note that this project could take years of research – approximately five years – however, it is estimated that the first results are encouraging despite the fact that there is still enough data to achieve the first successes.
The great presence of AI
Thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence, advances in natural language processing that this communicative system will be able to find out will be used, thus, voice assistants will respond thanks to this technology to give meaning to these sounds .
They want to recreate something similar to ‘GPT-3’ , the autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce texts that simulate human writing. To achieve this idea, experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, photographic engineering and marine biologists have come together to carry it out.
