Abstract
Word concreteness and imageability have proven crucial in understanding how humans process and represent language in the brain. While word-embeddings do not explicitly incorporate the concreteness of words into their computations, they have been shown to accurately predict human judgments of concreteness and imageability. Inspired by the recent interest in using neural activity patterns to analyze distributed meaning representations, we first show that brain responses acquired while human subjects passively comprehend natural stories can significantly distinguish the concreteness levels of the words encountered. We then examine for the same task whether the additional perceptual information in the brain representations can complement the contextual information in the word-embeddings. However, the results of our predictive models and residual analyses indicate the contrary. We find that the relevant information in the brain representations is a subset of the relevant information in the contextualized word-embeddings, providing new insight into the existing state of natural language processing models.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.cmcl-1.1
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- CMCL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–11
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.cmcl-1.1
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.cmcl-1.1
- Cite (ACL):
- Kalyan Ramakrishnan and Fatma Deniz. 2021. Non-Complementarity of Information in Word-Embedding and Brain Representations in Distinguishing between Concrete and Abstract Words. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 1–11, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Non-Complementarity of Information in Word-Embedding and Brain Representations in Distinguishing between Concrete and Abstract Words (Ramakrishnan & Deniz, CMCL 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.cmcl-1.1.pdf