Events Calendar

NL Seminar- Decoding Neuro-Semantic Representation of Stories across Languages

Speaker: Morteza Dehghani (USC), USC/ISI

Talk Title: Decoding Neuro-Semantic Representation of Stories across Languages

Series: Natural Language Seminar

Abstract: Understanding how conceptual knowledge is represented and organized in the human brain is one of the core problems of cognitive science, and many studies have aimed at exploring and understanding the similarities of neuro-semantic representations of concepts. A general approach that has been particularly fruitful in this domain is the investigation of the relationship between various corpus statistics of words and neural activity during exposure to those words. In this work, we examine the neuro-semantic representations of stories across three different languages. We demonstrate that using new advances in vector-based representation of text and paragraphs, fMRI signals can be reliably mapped to story representations. We also show that such representations can capture common neuro-semantic representation of stories across different languages. Finally, performing search-light analysis using over a billion regressions, we show that activation patterns in the default mode network of the brain are the most reliable features for decoding stories.



Biography: Morteza is an Assistant Professor of psychology, computer science and the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California. His research spans the boundary between psychology and artificial intelligence, as does his education. His work investigates properties of cognition by using documents of the social discourse, such as narratives, social media, transcriptions of speeches and news articles, in conjunction to behavioral studies.

Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight

More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Peter Zamar

Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/