Mapping Brains with Language Models: A Survey

Antonia Karamolegkou, Mostafa Abdou, Anders Søgaard


Abstract
Over the years, many researchers have seemingly made the same observation: Brain and language model activations exhibit some structural similarities, enabling linear partial mappings between features extracted from neural recordings and computational language models. In an attempt to evaluate how much evidence has been accumulated for this observation, we survey over 30 studies spanning 10 datasets and 8 metrics. How much evidence has been accumulated, and what, if anything, is missing before we can draw conclusions? Our analysis of the evaluation methods used in the literature reveals that some of the metrics are less conservative. We also find that the accumulated evidence, for now, remains ambiguous, but correlations with model size and quality provide grounds for cautious optimism.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.618
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9748–9762
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.618
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.618
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antonia Karamolegkou, Mostafa Abdou, and Anders Søgaard. 2023. Mapping Brains with Language Models: A Survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9748–9762, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mapping Brains with Language Models: A Survey (Karamolegkou et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-acl.618.pdf