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.