EEG2Text: Open Vocabulary EEG-to-Text Decoding with EEG Pre-Training and Multi-View Transformer

ACL ARR 2024 June Submission3242 Authors

15 Jun 2024 (modified: 02 Jul 2024)ACL ARR 2024 June SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Deciphering the intricacies of the human brain has captivated curiosity for centuries. Recent strides in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology, particularly using motor imagery, have restored motor functions such as reaching, grasping, and walking in paralyzed individuals. However, unraveling natural language from brain signals remains a formidable challenge. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique used to record electrical activity in the brain by placing electrodes on the scalp. Previous studies of EEG-to-text decoding have achieved high accuracy on small closed vocabularies, but still fall short of high accuracy when dealing with large open vocabularies. We propose a novel method, EEG2Text, to improve the accuracy of open vocabulary EEG-to-text decoding. Specifically, EEG2Text leverages EEG pre-training to enhance the learning of semantics from EEG signals and proposes a multi-view transformer to model the EEG signal processing by different spatial regions of the brain. Experiments show that EEG2Text has superior performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline methods by a large margin of up to 5% in absolute BLEU and ROUGE scores. EEG2Text shows great potential for a high-performance open-vocabulary brain-to-text system to facilitate communication.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: NLP Applications
Research Area Keywords: EEG, brain-to-text translation, brain language model
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 3242
Loading