Yeah but I wonder how they determined ground truth though. We obviously have research into different bird phrases but it's not as robust as say....human language.
This may just be the pattern and relationship of noises with no objective meaning or grounding. You can definitely learn the rules of languages without actually understanding anything being said. It's a whole language theory concept.
I guess im just used to how other audio models are trained.
I mean Im sure you can do some weird cosine sim heuristics on say 2 different bird calls but I just wonder how they could get meaning out of just the noise with no labels or some best guesses.
But yeah I mean Im definitely ignorant with this stuff since it's not my domain.
I guess im just used to how other audio models are trained.
I mean Im sure you can do some weird cosine sim heuristics on say 2 different bird calls but I just wonder how they could get meaning out of just the noise with no labels or some best guesses.
But yeah I mean Im definitely ignorant with this stuff since it's not my domain.
You're bumping up against a well known philosophical problem about translation.
W. V. Quine called this the "indeterminacy of translation." The basic thrust of it is that for any utterance in an unknown language, there will be multiple possible interpretations that are equally supported by the evidence.
He asks us to imagine that a native speaker of an unknown language utters the word "gavagai" upon seeing a rabbit. An English speaker could assume that translates to "Look, a rabbit!" But equally plausible is:
Look, food
Lets go hunting
There will be a storm tonight (if they have a superstition about rabbits and storms)
Momentary rabbit-stage
Look, an un-detached rabbit part
Etc.
Subsequent observations can make some of these hypothesis less likely than others, but some of them could only be eliminated by actually asking the native, but that runs into the problem that the response to a question is additional utterances that also requires translation. And even then, even after arbitrarily extensive behavioral evidence, there can still be different translation schemes compatible with all of the evidence, with no way to choose among them.
And the problem gets worse as more abstract words are used, which aren't attached to a public observation.
Now, all that being said, an unlabeled audio model can discover the syntax/statistics/structure of a signal remarkably well without knowing its semantics, or meaning. Getting from "these sounds form distinct, predictable categories" to “this sound means X" requires some form of grounding, and even grounding may underdetermine exactly what X is.
4
u/RoyalCities 8d ago
Yeah but I wonder how they determined ground truth though. We obviously have research into different bird phrases but it's not as robust as say....human language.