[IR Series] - Kai-min Kevin Chang - Friday, May 29 2009, noon - NSH 1507

[Grace Hui Yang]

Greetings,

 Please join us for our IR-Series talk this Friday noon!  Lunch will be 
provided by Yahoo!.

  Speaker: Kai-min Kevin Chang (Language Technologies Institute, School 
of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University)
  Time & Date: Friday May 29, 2009, noon.
  Place: NSH 1507 (Note the room is not the usual NSH 3002)
    
  Title: Quantitative modeling of the neural representation of 
adjective-noun phrases to account for fMRI activation
 
  Abstract:  
   Recent advances in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) offer 
a significant new approach to studying semantic representations in 
humans by making it possible to directly observe brain activity while 
people comprehend words and sentences. In this study, we investigate how 
humans comprehend adjective-noun phrases (e.g. strong dog) while their 
neural activity is recorded. Classification analysis shows that the 
distributed pattern of neural activity contains sufficient signal to 
decode differences among phrases. Furthermore, vector-based semantic 
models can explain a significant portion of systematic variance in the 
observed neural activity. Multiplicative composition models of the 
two-word phrase outperform additive models, consistent with the 
assumption that people use adjectives to modify the meaning of the noun, 
rather than conjoining the meaning of the adjective and noun.

   This talk is based on the author's ACL 2009 paper.

Grace, Jon & Jaime