[Intelligence Seminar] June 7, 3:30pm:, Presentation by Brian Murphy

[Dana Houston]

INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
> JUNE 7 AT 3:30PM, IN GHC 4303
>
> SPEAKER: BRIAN MURPHY (University of Trento)
> Host: Bob Frederking
> For meetings, contact Stacey Young (staceyy at cs.cmu.edu)
>
> GROUNDING MODELS OF LANGUAGE IN THE BRAIN
>
> Over recent decades, linguistics has produced an abundance of
> theoretical models, while suffering from a lack of empirical
> robustness. Judgments elicited from native speakers can provide
> nuanced insights into the psychological states underlying
> communicative behavior, but are distorted by pervasive cognitive
> biases. Corpora (large collections of text) have clear advantages of
> authenticity and size, but are divorced from the communicative
> context. Recordings of neural activity can provide a happy medium,
> giving an objective and direct snapshot of the language faculty in
> action, though the data is noisy and contains confounding activations
> due to other cognitive processes that typically accompany a language
> task. In this talk I will describe work we have carried out here at
> CIMeC, which uses machine learning methods to attempt to distinguish
> linguistic states and processes in the brain. I will concentrate on
> decoding lexical meaning, and in particular deal with the many
> systematic perceptual and performance-based confounds that can make
> this difficult.
>
> BIO
>
> Brian Murphy is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Mind/Brain
> Science, of the University of Trento, Italy. Before moving into
> research, he gained a degree in engineering and spent 5 years working
> in software development in Germany and China. He holds an M.Phil.
> (2001) and Ph.D. (2007) from Trinity College, Dublin, both in
> computational linguistics, with an emphasis on language semantics and
> its interaction with sentential syntax. Since coming to Trento, his
> main topic of research has been word meaning, using machine learning
> methods to discover conceptual organization both from large language
> corpora and recordings of neural activity (EEG, MEG and fMRI).
>

-- 
Dana M. Houston
Language Technologies Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5407 Gates Hillman Complex
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

T:  (412)268-6591
F:  (412)268-6298