TY - GEN
T1 - Neural activation semantic models
T2 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2018
AU - Athanasiou, Nikos
AU - Iosif, Elias
AU - Potamianos, Alexandros
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85098807144&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85098807144
T3 - COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings
SP - 2867
EP - 2878
BT - COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings
A2 - Bender, Emily M.
A2 - Derczynski, Leon
A2 - Isabelle, Pierre
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Y2 - 20 August 2018 through 26 August 2018
ER -