Neural activation semantic models: Computational lexical semantic models of localized neural activations

Nikos Athanasiou, Elias Iosif, Alexandros Potamianos

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    Neural activation models that have been proposed in the literature use a set of example words for which fMRI measurements are available in order to find a mapping between word semantics and localized neural activations. Successful mappings let us expand to the full lexicon of concrete nouns using the assumption that similarity of meaning implies similar neural activation patterns. In this paper, we propose a computational model that estimates semantic similarity in the neural activation space and investigates the relative performance of this model for various natural language processing tasks. Despite the simplicity of the proposed model and the very small number of example words used to bootstrap it, the neural activation semantic model performs surprisingly well compared to state-of-the-art word embeddings. Specifically, the neural activation semantic model performs better than the state-of-the-art for the task of semantic similarity estimation between very similar or very dissimilar words, while performing well on other tasks such as entailment and word categorization. These are strong indications that neural activation semantic models can not only shed some light into human cognition but also contribute to computation models for certain tasks.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationCOLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings
    EditorsEmily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
    PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
    Pages2867-2878
    Number of pages12
    ISBN (Electronic)9781948087506
    Publication statusPublished - 2018
    Event27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2018 - Santa Fe, United States
    Duration: 20 Aug 201826 Aug 2018

    Publication series

    NameCOLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings

    Conference

    Conference27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2018
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CitySanta Fe
    Period20/08/1826/08/18

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