A Preview of Computational Animal Linguistics

Abstract

Computational animal linguistics is an emerging field that studies non-human animal vocal communication as a language system using data-driven computational approaches. This survey starts with humanity’s historical endeavor to understand animal communication and a background on the essential linguistic properties in human languages. It presents current evidence of animals possessing some of these properties previously thought to be unique to humans. Driven by advancements in deep learning and artificial intelligence, computational methods from natural language processing and large language modeling are playing a major role in processing and understanding animal communication on a larger scale moving forward beyond traditional approaches.