Transcribing Vocal Communications of Domestic Shiba lnu Dogs

How animals communicate and whether they have languages is a persistent curiosity of human beings. However, the study of animal communications has been largely restricted to data from field recordings or in a controlled environment, which is expensive and limited in scale and variety. In this paper, we take domestic Shiba Inu dogs as an example and extract their vocal communications from a large amount of YouTube videos of Shiba Inu dogs. We classify these clips into different scenarios and locations, and further transcribe the audio into phonetically symbolic scripts through a systematic process. We discover consistent phonetic symbols among their expressions, which indicates that Shiba Inu dogs can have systematic verbal communication patterns. This reusable framework produces the first-of-its-kind Shiba Inu vocal communication dataset that will be valuable to future research in both zoology and linguistics.