Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet
Theron S. Wang, Xingyuan Li, Hridayesh Lekhak, Tuan Minh Dang, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu
Abstract
Dogs communicate intelligently but little is known about the phonetic properties of their vocalization communication. For the first time, this paper presents an iterative algorithm inspired by human phonetic discovery, which is based on minimal pairs that determine phonemes by distinguishing different words in human language, and is able to produce a complete alphabet of distinct canine phoneme-like units. In addition, the algorithm produces a number of canine repeated acoustic units, which may correspond to specific environments and activities of a dog, composed exclusively of the canine phoneme-like units in the alphabet. The framework outlined in this paper is expected to function not only on canines but other animal species.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2025-toward,
title = "Toward Automatic Discovery of a Canine Phonetic Alphabet",
author = "Wang, Theron S. and
Li, Xingyuan and
Lekhak, Hridayesh and
Dang, Tuan Minh and
Wu, Mengyue and
Zhu, Kenny Q.",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.451/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.451",
pages = "9207--9219",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}