Natural Language Processing ePosters

Humans possess the remarkable ability to extract discrete words and construct meaningful sentences from continuous streams of acoustic signals. While brain regions such as the superior temporal gyrus (STG) are known to be involved in speech recognition, how populations of neurons coordinate to enable this process…

Mirative markers, such as “surprisingly”, are linguistic elements that encode a violation of expectations (Delancey, 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012). Such markers are used for expectation management during communication, informing the listener about an upcoming unexpected message. Sensitivity to mirative markers relies…

We investigated whether transformer-based machine learning (ML) models could have similar behaviors to humans and predict electrophysiological data in audiovisual speech recognition tasks. Human audiovisual speech recognition follows principles of Bayes-optimal integration, with each modality weighted by its…

Our ability to perceive speech remains resilient to variations in voice, rate, and temporal interruptions. While inference models addressed the first two [1], the computational principles by which speech understanding remains impervious to temporal restructuring are largely unexplored. Previous studies indicated…

Animals experience the world as a continuous sequence of complex high-dimensional sensory stimuli. They need to build internal models from this ongoing stream of experiences with few supervisory and reinforcement signals. How they accomplish this feat remains unclear. One possibility is that the brain relies on a…

Cameras allow recording animal behavior with high temporal and spatial resolution. However, cameras also produce large amounts of data, which become time-consuming to annotate. Hence, recent research has turned to machine-learning-assisted tools to automate animal behavior labeling. Existing Deep Learning methods…

Undirected behavior reflects cognitive functions and provides insights for diagnosing psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder (BD) (McReynolds, 1962). Open-field animal behaviors have been well-studied for this purpose; however, a corresponding human subject paradigm is still lacking, and quantifying complex…

Human conversations are one of the most common methods for communication and social interactions. Engaging in a conversation, our brains are able to flexibly transit between speaker-listener alternations, and actively process language comprehension or production planning with ease. Previous work showed a series of…

The eyes are a window into the mind. Eye-tracking studies in the psychology literature report large individual differences in how people deploy attention when scanning photographs of real-world environments. Yet, a key question remains unanswered. Are the eyes a window into a specific mind? In other words, are…

Artificial neural networks (ANN) have emerged as computationally plausible models of human language processing. A major criticism of these models is that the amount of training data they receive far exceeds that of humans. Here, we use two complementary approaches to ask how the models’ ability to capture human neural…

One of the most essential language skills that humans possess is the ability to correctly execute actions based on linguistic instructions. Here we use the latest advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create a neural model of this cognitive ability. Models are trained on a set of 50 psychophysical tasks…

LSTMs trained on next word prediction can accurately perform linguistic tasks that require tracking long-distance syntactic dependencies. Notably, model accuracy approaches human performance on subject-verb number agreement tasks including cases with interfering attractors (Gulordava et al., 2018). However, we do not…

One of humans’ most astonishing cognitive feats is the dual ability to interpret linguistic instructions to perform novel tasks in very few practice trials and conversely produce a linguistic description for a task once it has been learned. In contrast, it typically takes thousands of trials for animals to learn even…