Is EEG-to-Text Feasible in Real-World Scenarios? An In-Depth Analysis Using a Neuropsychology-Inspired Benchmark
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Translating brain signals into text could restore communication for people with severe paralysis, yet practically usable systems to date rely on invasive electrocorticography (ECoG).Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive alternative, and EEG-to-text (EEG2Text) has been widely explored.Interestingly, however, EEG2Text models generally rely on teacher-forcing evaluation; without it, they fail to generate meaningful decoding.This reliance prevents EEG2Text from being applied in real-world, non-academic settings.This has fueled numerous debates about whether EEG2Text is a meaningful direction, by extension, and whether EEG truly contains decodable linguistic information.Here, using a neuropsychology-informed paradigm, we find that existing EEG2Text benchmarks have neglected EEG instability, a flaw that has confounded inference and sparked debate.Our experiments furnish key evidence for the feasibility of teacher-forcing-free EEG2Text decoding.Accordingly, we assemble the Corpus OF Eeg-To-Text (COFETT) using a 128-channel highdensity EEG cap, providing a benchmark dedicated to evaluating EEG2Text models.In comparisons with multiple existing benchmarks, COFETT achieves SOTA ability to distinguish among model performances and enables robust, teacher-forcing-free evaluation, thereby opening a path toward practical EEG2Text applications.COFETT is open sourced in https: //github.com/baoyudu/COFETT.
Authors: Zihan Zhang, Yu Bao, Xiao Ding, Tianyi Jiang, Kai Xiong
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Award: G4442529403
OpenAlex ID: W7166799362