Selecting Corpus-Semantic Models for Neurolinguistic Decoding

Neurosemantics aims to learn the mapping between concepts and the neural activity which they elicit during neuroimaging experiments. Different approaches have been used to represent individual concepts, but current state-of-the-art techniques require extensive manual intervention to scale to arbitrary words and domains. To overcome this challenge, we initiate a systematic comparison of automatically-derived corpus representations, based on various types of textual co-occurrence. We find that dependency parse-based features are the most effective, achieving accuracies similar to the leading semi-manual approaches and higher than any published for a corpus-based model. We also find that simple word features enriched with directional information provide a close-tooptimal solution at much lower computational cost.