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 Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Manuel Cebral-Loureda, Elvira G. Rincon-Flores, and Gildardo Sanchez-Ante, editors, What AI Ca... 2023

How the Brain Dynamically Constructs Sentence-Level Meanings From Word-Level Features Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2022. 2022

Understanding the Semantic Space: How Word Meanings Dynamically Adapt in the Context of a Sentence Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognit... 2021

From Words to Sentences and Back: Characterizing Context-dependent Meaning Representations in the Brain Nora Aguirre-Celis a.k.a. Nora E. Aguirre Sampayo PhD Thesis, Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico, December... 2021

Characterizing the Effect of Sentence Context on Word Meanings: Mapping Brain to Behavior Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen arXiv:2007.13840, July 2020. 2020

Characterizing Dynamic Word Meaning Representations in the Brain Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-VI), Barcelon... 2020

Quantifying the Conceptual Combination Effect on Word Meanings Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Proceedings of the 41th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Montreal, CA, Ju... 2019

Combining fMRI Data and Neural Networks to Quantify Contextual Effects in the Brain Nora Aguirre-Celis and Risto Miikkulainen In Shouyi Wang, Vicky Yamamoto, Jianzhong Su, Yang Yang, Eric Jones, Leon Iasemidis, Tom Mitchell, e... 2018

From Words to Sentences & Back: Characterizing Context-dependent Meaning Representations in the Brain Nora Aguirre-Celis, Manuel Valenzuela, and Risto Miikkulainen In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, London, UK, July... 2017