Nora E. Aguirre-Celis
Ph.D. Alumni
Nora's PhD work focused on how the brain dynamically constructs sentence-level meanings from word-level features. Her research uses neural networks for Prediction and Interpretation of fMRI images of sentences. The neural network is trained to map word features (using brain-based attribute representations, Binder et al., 2009) to word fMRIs. Then, the FGREP neural network (Miikkulainen, 1991) is used to determine how the representations would have to change to predict the fMRI patterns more accurately. These changes represent the effect of context. The new word representations are multimodal; grounded in different brain systems. The context-based representations could be used for AI applications such as service robots. Her PhD research was a joint collaboration between UT Austin and ITESM, Mexico, with Risto Miikkulainen as her main advisor.
What AI Can Do for Neuroscience: Understanding How the Brain Represents Word Meanings 2023
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, In What AI Can Do: Strengths and Limitations of Artificial Intelligence, Manuel Cebral-Loureda, Elvira G. Rincon-Flores, and Gildardo Sanchez-Ante (Eds.), pp. 401-417, 2023. CRC Press.
How the Brain Dynamically Constructs Sentence-Level Meanings From Word-Level Features 2022
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2022).
From Words to Sentences and Back: Characterizing Context-dependent Meaning Representations in the Brain 2021
Nora Aguirre-Celis a.k.a. Nora E. Aguirre Sampayo, PhD Thesis, Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.
Understanding the Semantic Space: How Word Meanings Dynamically Adapt in the Context of a Sentence 2021
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science , Groningen, Netherlands, June 2021.
Characterizing Dynamic Word Meaning Representations in the Brain 2020
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-VI), Barcelona, ES, December 2020.
Characterizing the Effect of Sentence Context on Word Meanings: Mapping Brain to Behavior 2020
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, arXiv:2007.13840 (2020).
Quantifying the Conceptual Combination Effect on Word Meanings 2019
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the 41th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Montreal, CA, July 2019.
Combining fMRI Data and Neural Networks to Quantify Contextual Effects in the Brain 2018
Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen, In Brain Informatics. BI 2018. Lectures Notes in Computer Sciences, Shouyi Wang, Vicky Yamamoto, Jianzhong Su, Yang Yang, Eric Jones, Leon Iasemidis, Tom Mitchell (Eds.), Vol. 11309, pp. 129-14...
From Words to Sentences & Back: Characterizing Context-dependent Meaning Representations in the Brain 2017
Nora Aguirre-Celis, Manuel Valenzuela, and Risto Miikkulainen, In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK, July 2017.
Formerly affiliated with Neural Networks