<ul><li>Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees, communicate with vocal calls, and a team of Swiss scientists discovered that they can combine these calls into larger semantic structures.</li><li>Using distributional semantics, the scientists built a database of 700 bonobo calls to decipher their meaning.</li><li>The method involved mapping bonobo call vectors onto context vectors to identify similar meaning based on similar usage.</li><li>This research provides insights into bonobos' communication abilities and challenges previous assumptions about the uniqueness of human language.</li></ul>

Bonobos’ calls may be the closest thing to animal language we’ve seen

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