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- Title
Semantic Structural Alignment of Neural Representational Spaces Enables Translation between English and Chinese Words.
- Authors
Zinszer, Benjamin D.; Anderson, Andrew J.; Kang, Olivia; Wheatley, Thalia; Raizada, Rajeev D. S.
- Abstract
Two sets of items can share the same underlying conceptual structure, while appearing unrelated at a surface level. Humans excel at recognizing and using alignments between such underlying structures in many domains of cognition, most notably in analogical reasoning. Here we show that structural alignment reveals how different people's neural representations of word meaning are preserved across different languages, such that patterns of brain activation can be used to translate words from one language to another. Groups of Chinese and English speakers underwent fMRI scanning while reading words in their respective native languages. Simply by aligning structures representing the two groups' neural semantic spaces, we successfully infer all seven Chinese-English word translations. Beyond language translation, conceptual structural alignment underlies many aspects of highlevel cognition, and this work opens the door to deriving many such alignments directly fromneural representational content.
- Subjects
ENGLISH language -- Translating into Chinese; CHINESE language -- Translating into English; SEMANTICS; FUNCTIONAL magnetic resonance imaging; COGNITION
- Publication
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2016, Vol 28, Issue 11, p1749
- ISSN
0898-929X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1162/jocn_a_01000