January 17, 2008

Dr. Doolittle in silicon

The Reg passes along a Reuters story that Hungarian scientists have built a system to automatically understand canine vocalizations. I’d like to say it’s a woof-to-Magyar translator, but apparently all it does is recognize the doggies’ emotional states. The story reports that the system has 43% accuracy, vs. 40% for humans.

I must confess, however, to being somewhat puzzled about how they measure success. Does the pooch fill out a survey form afterwards? Do they conclude that the beast wasn’t angry if the experimenter doesn’t get bitten?

I need to know a bit more about the research protocol before I know what to think about this.

EDIT: The CBC has a little more detail. The underlying research paper is appearing in Animal Cognition.

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One Response to “Dr. Doolittle in silicon”

  1. Text Technologies»Blog Archive » Lynda Moulton on enterprise search on January 17th, 2008 2:13 am

    […] search quite similarly, as I discovered when she called me yesterday to praise my post on the many differences between enterprise and web search, and followed up with this one of her own. One of Lynda’s big themes is that large […]

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