2021
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Dissociating Semantic and Phonemic Search Strategies in the Phonemic Verbal Fluency Task in early Dementia
Hali Lindsay
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Philipp Müller
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Nicklas Linz
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Radia Zeghari
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Mario Magued Mina
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Alexandra Konig
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Johannes Tröger
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: Improving Access
Effective management of dementia hinges on timely detection and precise diagnosis of the underlying cause of the syndrome at an early mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage. Verbal fluency tasks are among the most often applied tests for early dementia detection due to their efficiency and ease of use. In these tasks, participants are asked to produce as many words as possible belonging to either a semantic category (SVF task) or a phonemic category (PVF task). Even though both SVF and PVF share neurocognitive function profiles, the PVF is typically believed to be less sensitive to measure MCI-related cognitive impairment and recent research on fine-grained automatic evaluation of VF tasks has mainly focused on the SVF. Contrary to this belief, we show that by applying state-of-the-art semantic and phonemic distance metrics in automatic analysis of PVF word productions, in-depth conclusions about production strategy of MCI patients are possible. Our results reveal a dissociation between semantically- and phonemically-guided search processes in the PVF. Specifically, we show that subjects with MCI rely less on semantic- and more on phonemic processes to guide their word production as compared to healthy controls (HC). We further show that semantic similarity-based features improve automatic MCI versus HC classification by 29% over previous approaches for the PVF. As such, these results point towards the yet underexplored utility of the PVF for in-depth assessment of cognition in MCI.
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Multilingual Learning for Mild Cognitive Impairment Screening from a Clinical Speech Task
Hali Lindsay
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Philipp Müller
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Insa Kröger
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Johannes Tröger
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Nicklas Linz
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Alexandra Konig
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Radia Zeghari
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Frans RJ Verhey
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Inez HGB Ramakers
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)
The Semantic Verbal Fluency Task (SVF) is an efficient and minimally invasive speech-based screening tool for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In the SVF, testees have to produce as many words for a given semantic category as possible within 60 seconds. State-of-the-art approaches for automatic evaluation of the SVF employ word embeddings to analyze semantic similarities in these word sequences. While these approaches have proven promising in a variety of test languages, the small amount of data available for any given language limits the performance. In this paper, we for the first time investigate multilingual learning approaches for MCI classification from the SVF in order to combat data scarcity. To allow for cross-language generalisation, these approaches either rely on translation to a shared language, or make use of several distinct word embeddings. In evaluations on a multilingual corpus of older French, Dutch, and German participants (Controls=66, MCI=66), we show that our multilingual approaches clearly improve over single-language baselines.
2019
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Multilingual prediction of Alzheimer’s disease through domain adaptation and concept-based language modelling
Kathleen C. Fraser
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Nicklas Linz
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Bai Li
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Kristina Lundholm Fors
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Frank Rudzicz
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Alexandra König
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Jan Alexandersson
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Philippe Robert
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Dimitrios Kokkinakis
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
There is growing evidence that changes in speech and language may be early markers of dementia, but much of the previous NLP work in this area has been limited by the size of the available datasets. Here, we compare several methods of domain adaptation to augment a small French dataset of picture descriptions (n = 57) with a much larger English dataset (n = 550), for the task of automatically distinguishing participants with dementia from controls. The first challenge is to identify a set of features that transfer across languages; in addition to previously used features based on information units, we introduce a new set of features to model the order in which information units are produced by dementia patients and controls. These concept-based language model features improve classification performance in both English and French separately, and the best result (AUC = 0.89) is achieved using the multilingual training set with a combination of information and language model features.
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The importance of sharing patient-generated clinical speech and language data
Kathleen C. Fraser
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Nicklas Linz
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Hali Lindsay
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Alexandra König
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Increased access to large datasets has driven progress in NLP. However, most computational studies of clinically-validated, patient-generated speech and language involve very few datapoints, as such data are difficult (and expensive) to collect. In this position paper, we argue that we must find ways to promote data sharing across research groups, in order to build datasets of a more appropriate size for NLP and machine learning analysis. We review the benefits and challenges of sharing clinical language data, and suggest several concrete actions by both clinical and NLP researchers to encourage multi-site and multi-disciplinary data sharing. We also propose the creation of a collaborative data sharing platform, to allow NLP researchers to take a more active responsibility for data transcription, annotation, and curation.
2017
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Using Neural Word Embeddings in the Analysis of the Clinical Semantic Verbal Fluency Task
Nicklas Linz
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Johannes Tröger
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Jan Alexandersson
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Alexandra König
IWCS 2017 — 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics — Short papers