121 - Language and the Brain, with Alona Fyshe

We invited Alona Fyshe to talk about the link between NLP and the human brain. We began by talking about what we currently know about the connection between representations used in NLP and representations recorded in the brain. We also discussed how different brain imaging techniques compare to each other. We then dove into experiments investigating how hidden states of LSTM language models correlate with EEG brain imaging data on three types of language inputs: well-formed grammatical sentences, pseudo-word sentences preserving syntax but not semantics, and word-lists preserving neither. We talk about the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from these correlations and conclude by discussing avenues for future work.