We recorded and preprocessed ZuCo 2.0, a new dataset of simultaneous eye-tracking and electroencephalography during natural reading and during annotation. This corpus contains gaze and brain activity data of 739 English sentences, 349 in a normal reading paradigm and 390 in a task-specific paradigm, in which the 18 participants actively search for a semantic relation type in the given sentences as a linguistic annotation task. This new dataset complements ZuCo 1.0 by providing experiments designed to analyze the differences in cognitive processing between natural reading and annotation. The data is freely available here: https://osf.io/2urht/.

An interesting method of evaluating word representations is by how much they reflect the semantic representations in the human brain. However, most, if not all, previous works only focus on small datasets and a single modality. In this paper, we present the first multi-modal framework for evaluating English word representations based on cognitive lexical semantics. Six types of word embeddings are evaluated by fitting them to 15 datasets of eye-tracking, EEG and fMRI signals recorded during language processing. To achieve a global score over all evaluation hypotheses, we apply statistical significance testing accounting for the multiple comparisons problem. This framework is easily extensible and available to include other intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. We find strong correlations in the results between cognitive datasets, across recording modalities and to their performance on extrinsic NLP tasks.