Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders

Julia Parish-Morris, Christopher Cieri, Mark Liberman, Leila Bateman, Emily Ferguson, Robert T. Schultz


Abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that would benefit from low-cost and reliable improvements to screening and diagnosis. Human language technologies (HLTs) provide one possible route to automating a series of subjective decisions that currently inform “Gold Standard” diagnosis based on clinical judgment. In this paper, we describe a new resource to support this goal, comprised of 100 20-minute semi-structured English language samples labeled with child age, sex, IQ, autism symptom severity, and diagnostic classification. We assess the feasibility of digitizing and processing sensitive clinical samples for data sharing, and identify areas of difficulty. Using the methods described here, we propose to join forces with researchers and clinicians throughout the world to establish an international repository of annotated language samples from individuals with ASD and related disorders. This project has the potential to improve the lives of individuals with ASD and their families by identifying linguistic features that could improve remote screening, inform personalized intervention, and promote advancements in clinically-oriented HLTs.
Anthology ID:
L16-1333
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2100–2107
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1333
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julia Parish-Morris, Christopher Cieri, Mark Liberman, Leila Bateman, Emily Ferguson, and Robert T. Schultz. 2016. Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2100–2107, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders (Parish-Morris et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/L16-1333.pdf