Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence - Natural Language Messages

Natural Language Messages

This research focuses on the event that we receive a signal / message that is either not directed at us (eavesdropping) or one that is in its natural communicative form. To tackle this difficult but probable scenario, methods are being developed that will first detect if a signal has intelligent-like structure, categorize the type of structure detected and then decipher its content: from its physical level encoding and patterns to the parts-of-speech, which encode internal and external ontologies.

Primarily, this structure modeling focuses on the search for generic human and inter-species language universals to devise computational methods by which language can be discriminated from non-language and core structural syntactic elements of unknown languages can be detected. Aims of this research include: contributing to the understanding of language structure and the detection of intelligent language-like features in signals, to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

The problem goal is therefore to separate language from non-language without dialogue, and learn something about the structure of language in the passing. The language may not be human (animals, aliens, computers...), the perceptual space can be unknown, and we cannot assume human language structure but must begin somewhere. We need to approach the language signal from a naive viewpoint, in effect, increasing our ignorance and assuming as little as possible.