Keywords In and Out of Context

“The Faculty of Language” by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch with its wonderful subtitle (“What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?”) has garnered so many citations since its 2002 publication in Science that it certainly doesn’t need one from me (though of course it got one) so here instead I would mention a fascinating 2023 article by Andreas and a very global group of colleagues about studying sperm whale communication which also cites Hauser et al. but that I didn’t cite (because, even though my book’s brief was certainly broad, I couldn’t justify extending it beyond primates to cetaceans!)

What is particularly interesting about this “Project CETI” is their deployment of machine learning to attempt to decipher underwater biological sounds that are being continuously collected by passive acoustic monitoring throughout the world’s oceans and to use language modeling tools to understand the whales’ natural communication systems. Perhaps artificial intelligence means can do what human intelligence has so far failed to do: truly understand this important form of non-human communication.