Read the following passage about urban shift and mark the letter A, B, C, D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.
[I] Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. [II] They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. [III] But there’s also a lot we don’t know about them, including what they may be saying to one another when communicating with a system of short clicks, known as codas. [IV]
Now, new research published in Nature Communications today suggests that sperm whales’ communication is actually much more expressive and complicated than was previously thought. A team of researchers led by Pratyusha Sharma at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) working with Project CETI, a nonprofit focused on using AI to understand whales, used statistical models to analyze whale codas and managed to identify a structure to their language that’s similar to features of human language. Their findings represent a tool future researchers could use to decipher not just the structure but the actual meaning of whale sounds.
For the study, the researchers examined recordings of 8,719 codas from around 60 whales collected by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project between 2005 and 2018, using a mix of AI algorithms for pattern recognition and classification. The AI then turned the clicks within the coda data into a new kind of data visualization called an exchange plot, revealing that some codas featured extra clicks. These extra clicks, combined with variations in the duration of their calls, appeared in interactions between multiple whales, which they say suggests that codas can carry more information and possess a more complicated internal structure than we had previously believed.
The team’s next step is to build language models of whale calls and to examine how those calls relate to different behaviors. They also plan to work on a more universal system that could be used across species, says Sharma. Taking a communication system we know nothing about, working out how it encodes and transmits information, and slowly beginning to understand what’s being communicated could have many purposes beyond whales. “I think we’re just starting to understand some of these things,” she says. “We’re very much at the beginning, but we are slowly making our way through.”
(Adapted from technologyreview.com)