Computer translates Hungarian dog dialect. Predicted statements not heard.
A famous dog translator: David spent years speaking with his neighbor's dog, Harvey, without the aid of Hungarian computers. Fortunately, we can't all be like him.
Courtesy Wikimedia commons“Doctor, no! I need those!” “Kibbles and bits, kibbles and bits,” “It tasted great both times I ate it,” and “Rook out, Raggy!” All exclamations humanity has every right to expect from a dog. The canine linguistics community, however, has been left sorely disappointed by the recent bark translations of a team of Hungarian researchers.
The Hungarians, no doubt doing their best with the resources at hand, recorded and digitized over 6,000 barks of Hungarian sheepdogs, and fed them into a specially designed computer program. The computer was then able to correctly identify, 43 percent of the time, whether the dog was barking in a “fight,” “stranger,” “play,” “walk,” “alone,” or “ball” scenario, with “fight” and “stranger” most often yielding accurate results. The program was also able to correctly determine the individual dog barking 52 percent of the time.
Both of these statistics are much better than the average human translation of dog barking, although they pale in comparison to some of history’s more notable dog translators (Shaggy, The Son of Sam and Jack London, to name just a few). It is, certainly, an admirable start, and it has got me looking forward to the day when I can ask my brother’s dog just what’s so great about putting his nose right there, exactly.
Email
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Google
Yahoo
Science Buzz and all related activities
Add a new comment