Part-of-Speech Classification from Magnetoencephalography Data Using 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network

Neural decoding of speech and language refers to the extraction of information regarding the stimulus and the mental state of subjects from recordings of their brain activity while performing linguistic tasks. Recent years have seen significant progress in the decoding of speech from cortical activity. This study instead focuses on decoding linguistic information. We present a deep parallel temporal convolutional neural network (1DCNN) trained on part-of-speech (PoS) classification from magnetoencephalography (MEG) data collected during natural language reading. The network is trained on data from 15 human subjects separately, and yields above-chance accuracies on test data for all of them. The level of PoS was targeted because it offers a clean linguistic benchmark level that represents syntactic information and abstracts away from semantic or conceptual representations.