Title: Investigating Semantic Representation in the Brain via Nnaturalistic Neuroimaging
Speaker: Dr.Emin Çelik
Time: 26 March, Thursday, 16:30
Place: SC 106, ASBAM
Abstract: How does a human brain represent meaning? How does it make sense of a complicated visual scene or understand a lengthy paragraph? In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the semantic representation literature and tell you about how I investigated this central question in neuroscience across both vision and language. I will also talk about how state-of-the-art language models and a naturalistic neuroimaging framework can be used to tackle this question. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how I plan to probe contextual effects on semantic representation, how we can effectively move from unimodal to multimodal semantic representation, and how I plan to study cross-linguistic effects.
Bio: Emin Çelik received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University and his M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He then returned to Bilkent and joined the newly-established Neuroscience Program where he completed his Ph.D. in 2022. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, where he investigated the principles of semantic representation in the human brain during language comprehension, using tools from natural language processing (including large language models), computational neuroscience, and machine learning.