Detecting Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) from Text: A Benchmarking Study

Ghofrane Merhbene, Fabian Lecron, Philippe Fortemps, Bradford C. Dickerson, Mascha Kurpicz-Briki, Neguine Rezaii


Abstract
Classifying subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) from connected speech presents significant diagnostic challenges due to overlapping linguistic markers. This study benchmarks the performance of traditional machine learning models with various feature extraction techniques, transformer-based models, and large language models (LLMs) for PPA classification. Our results indicate that while transformer-based models and LLMs exceed chance-level performance in terms of balanced accuracy, traditional classifiers combined with contextual embeddings remain highly competitive. Notably, MLP using MentalBert’s embeddings achieves the highest accuracy. These findings underscore the potential of machine learning for enhancing the automatic classification of PPA subtypes.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.19
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
355–374
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.19/
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Cite (ACL):
Ghofrane Merhbene, Fabian Lecron, Philippe Fortemps, Bradford C. Dickerson, Mascha Kurpicz-Briki, and Neguine Rezaii. 2026. Detecting Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) from Text: A Benchmarking Study. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 355–374, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) from Text: A Benchmarking Study (Merhbene et al., Findings 2026)
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