Universal grounding of lexical semantics
Prof. John Mansfield, together with collaborators Fei Gao and Tim Proix, presented a poster at the Society of the Neuroscience of Language conference in Geneva. They shared results showing that the conceptual relations lexicalised in some non-European languages are reflected in distinctive brain responses in speakers of European languages. For example many languages around the world use the same word for both HAIR and FEATHERS (e.g. Hawaiian, "hulu"); this is not found in any European language, but MEG brain data from French speakers shows a specific brain response to this conceptual relation, compared to concept pairs matched for surprisal and distributional similarity. Furthermore, they showed that recent generations of LLMs represent these conceptual relations with an internal geometry that correlates with the brain activation patterns of some (but not all) of the experimental participants.