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科学美国人60秒 SSS Bat Chatter Is More Than a Cry in the Dark

时间:2017-03-06 07:01:03

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(单词翻译)

 

When we humans talk to other humans, the sounds we make all have very specific meanings. "When I say apple you immediately imagine something that has the characteristics of an apple." Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "And the question is, do animals also have something like that?"

Yovel and his team chose to listen in on bats, which do a lot of vocalizing. In fact, in caves with vast numbers of bats, it's total cacophony1. [bat cave] "It sounds like a crowd in a football stadium before the match has begun, or something like that." To simplify the problem, the researchers eavesdropped2 on a much smaller colony—just 22 Egyptian fruit bats.

Over several months, they recorded tens of thousands of calls, [call] along with synced-up video—which allowed them to decipher the speaker, the intended recipient3, the situation, and the behavior resulting from each call. They then fed their huge database of calls to computers, to test whether machine learning could help make sense of them, using algorithms like the ones used for human speech recognition. 

Turns out, the algorithms could correctly identify which bat made each call, more often than chance would predict. "And I can say to some extent who is this bat shouting at, so who is the addressee of this vocalization?" They could even figure out what a bat might be angry about, like “hey, that’s my spot, or gimme some space] and how the addressee might respond—meaning there's really quite a lot of information embedded4 in bat vocalizations. Pretty useful, if you live in the dark. The study is in the journal Scientific Reports. [Yosef Prat, Mor Taub & Yossi Yovel, Everyday bat vocalizations contain information about emitter, addressee, context, and behavior]

As for whether we might someday have Google Translate for bat calls? "Well, Google, definitely not… but perhaps an iPhone." But seriously, "For sure in the next 100 years we will always be behind, we will never really be able to generate a bat to human dictionary. But definitely we will advance in that direction." And in doing so—it might shed a little light on animal communication in general. And how our own language evolved. 

—Christopher Intagliata


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点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 cacophony Sclyj     
n.刺耳的声音
参考例句:
  • All around was bubbling a cacophony of voices.周围人声嘈杂。
  • The drivers behind him honked,and the cacophony grew louder.后面的司机还在按喇叭,且那刺耳的声音越来越大。
2 eavesdropped e5ef5ebb355a2c067c2d99996f845e0f     
偷听(别人的谈话)( eavesdrop的过去式和过去分词 )
参考例句:
  • He eavesdropped on our conversation. 他偷听了我们的谈话。
  • He has just eavesdropped two sweethearts. 他刚刚偷听了两个情人的谈话。
3 recipient QA8zF     
a.接受的,感受性强的 n.接受者,感受者,容器
参考例句:
  • Please check that you have a valid email certificate for each recipient. 请检查是否对每个接收者都有有效的电子邮件证书。
  • Colombia is the biggest U . S aid recipient in Latin America. 哥伦比亚是美国在拉丁美洲最大的援助对象。
4 embedded lt9ztS     
a.扎牢的
参考例句:
  • an operation to remove glass that was embedded in his leg 取出扎入他腿部玻璃的手术
  • He has embedded his name in the minds of millions of people. 他的名字铭刻在数百万人民心中。

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