My work pictured by AI – Alexandra Bosshard

What is this work about?  Over the last twenty years researchers have become more and more interested in the way non-human animals communicate in order to explore what such findings could potentially tell us about the development of our own language.  Through applying methods borrowed from computational linguistics, we were able to show that the very social common marmoset monkey strings calls together to form larger sequences up to nine calls of length. Superficially similar to the way we combine meaningful units, like words, into phrases or sentences, marmosets seem to follow a similar set of rules when stringing their calls together to form larger structures. We can conclude that the vocal systems of non-human animals might be built up in more complex ways than what we previously thought.

The first word that came to mind when seeing the AI-generated picture? Complexity.