Papers

Peer-reviewed Lead author International journal
Dec 28, 2021

Measuring context dependency in birdsong using artificial neural networks

PLOS Computational Biology
  • Takashi Morita
  • ,
  • Hiroki Koda
  • ,
  • Kazuo Okanoya
  • ,
  • Ryosuke O. Tachibana

Volume
17
Number
12
First page
e1009707
Last page
e1009707
Language
English
Publishing type
Research paper (scientific journal)
DOI
10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009707
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Context dependency is a key feature in sequential structures of human language, which requires reference between words far apart in the produced sequence. Assessing how long the past context has an effect on the current status provides crucial information to understand the mechanism for complex sequential behaviors. Birdsongs serve as a representative model for studying the context dependency in sequential signals produced by non-human animals, while previous reports were upper-bounded by methodological limitations. Here, we newly estimated the context dependency in birdsongs in a more scalable way using a modern neural-network-based language model whose accessible context length is sufficiently long. The detected context dependency was beyond the order of traditional Markovian models of birdsong, but was consistent with previous experimental investigations. We also studied the relation between the assumed/auto-detected vocabulary size of birdsong (i.e., fine- vs. coarse-grained syllable classifications) and the context dependency. It turned out that the larger vocabulary (or the more fine-grained classification) is assumed, the shorter context dependency is detected.

Link information
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009707
PubMed
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34962915
PubMed Central
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8746767
Research Projects
発声運動学習が音声認識学習に与える影響に関する計算言語学的研究
Research Projects
Exploring deep transfer learning across heterogeneous data
Research Projects
NA
URL
https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009707
ID information
  • DOI : 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009707
  • eISSN : 1553-7358
  • Pubmed ID : 34962915
  • Pubmed Central ID : PMC8746767

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