@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://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.451/",
    pages = "9207--9219",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    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."
}