No Arabic abstract
P300 is an electric signal emitted by brain about 300 milliseconds after a rare, but relevant-for-the-user event. One of the applications of this signal is sentence spelling that enables subjects who lost the control of their motor pathways to communicate by selecting characters in a matrix containing all the alphabet symbols. Although this technology has made considerable progress in the last years, it still suffers from both low communication rate and high error rate. This article presents a P300 speller, named PolyMorph, that introduces two major novelties in the field: the selection matrix polymorphism, that reduces the size of the selection matrix itself by removing useless symbols, and sentence-based predictions, that exploit all the spelt characters of a sentence to determine the probability of a word. In order to measure the effectiveness of the presented speller, we describe two sets of tests: the first one in vivo and the second one in silico. The results of these experiments suggest that the use of PolyMorph in place of the naive character-by-character speller both increases the number of spelt characters per time unit and reduces the error rate.
We describe the experimental procedures for a dataset that we have made publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1494163 in mat and csv formats. This dataset contains electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of 24 subjects doing a visual P300 Brain-Computer Interface experiment on PC. The visual P300 is an event-related potential elicited by visual stimulation, peaking 240-600 ms after stimulus onset. The experiment was designed in order to compare the use of a P300-based brain-computer interface on a PC with and without adaptive calibration using Riemannian geometry. The brain-computer interface is based on electroencephalography (EEG). EEG data were recorded thanks to 16 electrodes. Data were recorded during an experiment taking place in the GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France, in 2013 (Congedo, 2013). Python code for manipulating the data is available at https://github.com/plcrodrigues/py.BI.EEG.2013-GIPSA. The ID of this dataset is BI.EEG.2013-GIPSA.
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can provide an alternative means of communication for individuals with severe neuromuscular limitations. The P300-based BCI speller relies on eliciting and detecting transient event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) data, in response to a user attending to rarely occurring target stimuli amongst a series of non-target stimuli. However, in most P300 speller implementations, the stimuli to be presented are randomly selected from a limited set of options and stimulus selection and presentation are not optimized based on previous user data. In this work, we propose a data-driven method for stimulus selection based on the expected discrimination gain metric. The data-driven approach selects stimuli based on previously observed stimulus responses, with the aim of choosing a set of stimuli that will provide the most information about the users intended target character. Our approach incorporates knowledge of physiological and system constraints imposed due to real-time BCI implementation. Simulations were performed to compare our stimulus selection approach to the row-column paradigm, the conventional stimulus selection method for P300 spellers. Results from the simulations demonstrated that our adaptive stimulus selection approach has the potential to significantly improve performance from the conventional method: up to 34% improvement in accuracy and 43% reduction in the mean number of stimulus presentations required to spell a character in a 72-character grid. In addition, our greedy approach to stimulus selection provides the flexibility to accommodate design constraints.
Objective: Previous works using a visual P300-based speller have reported an improvement modifying the shape or colour of the presented stimulus. However, the effects of both blended factors have not been yet studied. Thus, the aim of the present work was to study both factors and assess the interaction between them. Method: Fifteen naive participants tested four different spellers in a calibration and online task. All spellers were similar except the employed illumination of the target stimulus: white letters, white blocks, coloured letters, and coloured blocks. Results: The block-shaped conditions offered an improvement versus the letter-shaped conditions in the calibration (accuracy) and online (accuracy and correct commands per minute) tasks. Analysis of the P300 waveform showed a larger difference between target and no target stimulus waveforms for the block-shaped conditions versus the letter-shaped. The hypothesis regarding the colour heterogeneity of the stimuli was not found at any level of the analysis. Conclusion: The use of block-shaped illumination demonstrated a better performance than the standard letter-shaped flashing stimuli in classification performance, correct commands per minute, and P300 waveform.
A brain-computer interface (BCI) based on electroencephalography (EEG) is a promising technology for enhancing virtual reality (VR) applications-in particular, for gaming. We focus on the so-called P300-BCI, a stable and accurate BCI paradigm relying on the recognition of a positive event-related potential (ERP) occurring in the EEG about 300 ms post-stimulation. We implemented a basic version of such a BCI displayed on an ordinary and affordable smartphone-based head-mounted VR device: that is, a mobile and passive VR system (with no electronic components beyond the smartphone). The mobile phone performed the stimuli presentation, EEG synchronization (tagging) and feedback display. We compared the ERPs and the accuracy of the BCI on the VR device with a traditional BCI running on a personal computer (PC). We also evaluated the impact of subjective factors on the accuracy. The study was within-subjects, with 21 participants and one session in each modality. No significant difference in BCI accuracy was found between the PC and VR systems, although the P200 ERP was significantly wider and larger in the VR system as compared to the PC system.
Recently, open domain multi-turn chatbots have attracted much interest from lots of researchers in both academia and industry. The dominant retrieval-based methods use context-response matching mechanisms for multi-turn response selection. Specifically, the state-of-the-art methods perform the context-response matching by word or segment similarity. However, these models lack a full exploitation of the sentence-level semantic information, and make simple mistakes that humans can easily avoid. In this work, we propose a matching network, called sequential sentence matching network (S2M), to use the sentence-level semantic information to address the problem. Firstly and most importantly, we find that by using the sentence-level semantic information, the network successfully addresses the problem and gets a significant improvement on matching, resulting in a state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we integrate the sentence matching we introduced here and the usual word similarity matching reported in the current literature, to match at different semantic levels. Experiments on three public data sets show that such integration further improves the model performance.