Modeling affirmative and negated action processing in the brain with lexical and compositional semantic models

G. Djokic, Vesna; Maillard, Jean; Bulat, Luana and Shutova, Ekaterina. 2019. Modeling affirmative and negated action processing in the brain with lexical and compositional semantic models. Association for Computational Linguistics, P19-1, pp. 5155-5165. [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Recent work shows that distributional semantic models can be used to decode patterns of brain activity associated with individual words and sentence meanings. However, it is yet unclear to what extent such models can be used to study and ecode fMRI patterns associated with specific aspects of semantic composition such as the negation function. In this paper, we apply lexical and compositional semantic models to decode fMRI patterns associated with negated and affirmative sentences containing hand-action verbs. Our results show reduced decoding (correlation) of sentences where the verb is in the negated context, as compared to the affirmative one, within brain regions implicated in action-semantic processing. This supports behavioral and brain imaging studies, suggesting that negation involves reduced access to aspects of the affirmative mental representation. The results pave the way for testing alternate semantic models of negation against human semantic processing in the brain.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P19-1508

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Computing

Dates:

DateEvent
28 July 2019Published

Item ID:

28860

Date Deposited:

25 Jun 2020 10:54

Last Modified:

25 Jun 2020 10:56

Peer Reviewed:

Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28860

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