Using computational semantics to study meaning in the brain

Abstract

How do humans understand the meaning of individual words? How do we combine the meaning of multiple words to comprehend novel sentences? Cognitive neuroscience has addressed these questions by studying patterns of neural activation across the cerebral cortex, identifying the regions responsible for language processing. Meanwhile, computational linguistics has approached these questions by constructing vector-based models demonstrating how meaning can be represented as patterns of activation in artificial neural networks. In recent years, increasing recognition of these commonalities, along with the rapidly developing linguistic capabilities of large language models, has led to a surge in res..