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Innovations in Neural Conceptual Representation: Exploring Aspects of Semantics

Objective

Semantic representation –the knowledge that we have of the world– is an essential component of our mind whose nature can be inferred from similarity measures, which we use every day to compare entities on the basis of their meaning. Many research efforts have been made to understand our knowledge, proposing that it could be based upon data deriving from our sensorimotor experience or from any sort of regularity in spoken and/or written language. Recently, models combining these two data sources obtained semantic representations that are more informative and similar to human ones. However, 1) what information is used to represent meaning and 2) the way our brains organize semantic representations still remain hot topics of debate in the field.
The project aims to address these queries, by investigating, for the first time, the relation between semantic representations at three different levels: behaviour, models and brain activity. We will derive similarity measures and combined similarity models using different data sources (text corpora, semantic feature norms, ratings studies). Next, in an fMRI study, adult English speakers will perform implicit (lexical decision) and explicit (categorization) tasks. We will use (1) a state-of-the-art technique (Representational Similarity Analysis) that has heralded a new research era in the study of semantics since it allows one-to-one mappings between patterns of brain-activity measurement, behavioural and computational models, and (2) dimensionality-reduction approaches. Results will provide new knowledge on the nature of semantic structure: they will allow a better characterization of different similarity measures, adjudicating between the different similarity models and behavioural data as well as identifying differences between similarity models linked to differences in neural activity. This will reveal the different neural contributions to different aspects of meaning, opening up new research agendas.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2015

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 183 454,80
Address
GOWER STREET
WC1E 6BT London
United Kingdom

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Region
London Inner London — West Camden and City of London
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 183 454,80
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