Guest Lecture: Ariana Acosta, M.A. (University of Köln), "Alignment and Divergence in Humor Processing between Neural Responses and Language Models Metrics"

How closely do language models mirror human responses to humorous language? Humor provides an interesting testing ground because it often relies on ambiguity, reinterpretation, and controlled expectation violation. In EEG research, these processes are frequently reflected in modulations of the N400 component.
In this talk, Ariana Acosta will present an exploratory comparison between ERP findings from a pun-based humor experiment and computational measures derived from German BERT and GPT-2 models. She examines surprisal and entropy across joke, control, nonsense, and non-joke conditions. The results indicate that predictability measures from the models reflect some of the condition level differences observed in the ERP study, while varying across sentence types and measures. Acosta concludes by discussing how this type of comparative study contributes to discussions about the relationship between probabilistic language models and neural responses in language processing.

Poster