@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-eeg,
    title = "Is {EEG}-to-Text Feasible in Real-World Scenarios? An In-Depth Analysis Using a Neuropsychology-Inspired Benchmark",
    author = "Zhang, Zihan  and
      Bao, Yu  and
      Ding, Xiao  and
      Jiang, Tianyi  and
      Xiong, Kai",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.61/",
    pages = "1378--1393",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Translating brain signals into text could restore communication for people with severe paralysis, yet practically usable systems to date rely on invasive electrocorticography (ECoG). Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive alternative, and EEG-to-text (EEG2Text) has been widely explored. Interestingly, however, EEG2Text models generally rely on teacher-forcing evaluation; without it, they fail to generate meaningful decoding. This reliance prevents EEG2Text from being applied in real-world, non-academic settings. This has fueled numerous debates about whether EEG2Text is a meaningful direction, by extension, and whether EEG truly contains decodable linguistic information. Here, using a neuropsychology-informed paradigm, we find that existing EEG2Text benchmarks have neglected EEG instability, a flaw that has confounded inference and sparked debate. Our experiments furnish key evidence for the feasibility of teacher-forcing-free EEG2Text decoding. Accordingly, we assemble the Corpus OF Eeg-To-Text (COFETT) using a 128-channel high-density EEG cap, providing a benchmark dedicated to evaluating EEG2Text models. In comparisons with multiple existing benchmarks, COFETT achieves SOTA ability to distinguish among model performances and enables robust, teacher-forcing-free evaluation, thereby opening a path toward practical EEG2Text applications. COFETT is open sourced in https://github.com/baoyudu/COFETT."
}