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

[Grace Hui Yang]

Just a reminder that tomorrow noon we will have Kevin's  IR-series talk.

See you then!


Grace Hui Yang wrote:
> 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
>