Online Ternary Classification of Covert Speech by Leveraging the Passive Perception of Speech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide communicative alternatives to those without functional speech. Covert speech (CS)-based BCIs enable communication simply by thinking of words and thus have intuitive appeal. However, an elusive barrier to their clinical translation is the collection of voluminous examples of high-quality CS signals, as iteratively rehearsing words for long durations is mentally fatiguing. Research on CS and speech perception (SP) identifies common spatiotemporal patterns in their respective electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, pointing towards shared encoding mechanisms. The goal of this study was to investigate whether a model that leverages the signal similarities between SP and CS can differentiate speech-related EEG signals online. Ten participants completed a dyadic protocol where in each trial, they listened to a randomly selected word and then subsequently mentally rehearsed the word. In the offline sessions, eight words were presented to participants. For the subsequent online sessions, the two most distinct words (most separable in terms of their EEG signals) were chosen to form a ternary classification problem (two words and rest). The model comprised a functional mapping derived from SP and CS signals of the same speech token (features are extracted via a Riemannian approach). An average ternary online accuracy of 75.3% (60% chance level) was achieved across participants, with individual accuracies as high as 93%. Moreover, we observed that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of CS signals was enhanced by perception-covert modeling according to the level of high-frequency ([Formula: see text]-band) correspondence between CS and SP. These findings may lead to less burdensome data collection for training speech BCIs, which could eventually enhance the rate at which the vocabulary can grow.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".