# Aligning Brain Activity with Advanced Transformer Models: Exploring the Role of Punctuation in Semantic Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [What you can cram into a single vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01070/) (2018)
- [Assessing the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Syntax-Sensitive Dependencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01368/) (2016)
- [Interpreting and improving natural-language processing (in machines) with natural language-processing (in the brain)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11833/) (2019)
- [On the Practical Computational Power of Finite Precision RNNs for Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04908/) (2018)
- [Finding Syntax in Human Encephalography with Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04127/) (2018)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks as Weighted Language Recognizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05408/) (2017)
- [Rational Recurrences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09357/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04204/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This research examines the congruence between neural activity and advanced transformer models, emphasizing the semantic significance of punctuation in text understanding. Utilizing an innovative approach originally proposed by Toneva and Wehbe, we evaluate four advanced transformer models RoBERTa, DistiliBERT, ALBERT, and ELECTRA against neural activity data. Our findings indicate that RoBERTa exhibits the closest alignment with neural activity, surpassing BERT in accuracy. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of punctuation removal on model performance and neural alignment, revealing that BERT's accuracy enhances in the absence of punctuation. This study contributes to the comprehension of how neural networks represent language and the influence of punctuation on semantic processing within the human brain.