Enhancing EEG-to-Text Decoding through Transferable Representations from Pre-trained Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder

Jiaqi Wang, Zhenxi Song, Zhengyu Ma, Xipeng Qiu, Min Zhang, Zhiguo Zhang


Abstract
Reconstructing natural language from non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) holds great promise as a language decoding technology for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, EEG-based language decoding is still in its nascent stages, facing several technical issues such as: 1) Absence of a hybrid strategy that can effectively integrate cross-modality (between EEG and text) self-learning with intra-modality self-reconstruction of EEG features or textual sequences; 2) Under-utilization of large language models (LLMs) to enhance EEG-based language decoding. To address above issues, we propose the Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder (CET-MAE), a novel model that orchestrates compound self-supervised learning across and within EEG and text through a dedicated multi-stream encoder. Furthermore, we develop a framework called E2T-PTR (EEG-to-Text decoding using Pretrained Transferable Representations), which leverages pre-trained modules alongside the EEG stream from CET-MAE and further enables an LLM (specifically BART) to decode text from EEG sequences. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the popular text-evoked EEG database, ZuCo, demonstrate the superiority of E2T-PTR, which outperforms the baseline framework in ROUGE-1 F1 and BLEU-4 scores by 8.34% and 32.21%, respectively. Our proposed pre-trained EEG-Text model shows the potential to improve downstream tasks involving EEG and text. This opens up promising avenues for its application in inner speech BCI paradigms, meriting further investigation.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.393
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7278–7292
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.393
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.393
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiaqi Wang, Zhenxi Song, Zhengyu Ma, Xipeng Qiu, Min Zhang, and Zhiguo Zhang. 2024. Enhancing EEG-to-Text Decoding through Transferable Representations from Pre-trained Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7278–7292, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing EEG-to-Text Decoding through Transferable Representations from Pre-trained Contrastive EEG-Text Masked Autoencoder (Wang et al., ACL 2024)
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