@inproceedings{gkoumas-etal-2023-digital,
    title = "A Digital Language Coherence Marker for Monitoring Dementia",
    author = "Gkoumas, Dimitris  and
      Tsakalidis, Adam  and
      Liakata, Maria",
    editor = "Bouamor, Houda  and
      Pino, Juan  and
      Bali, Kalika",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = dec,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Singapore",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2023.emnlp-main.994/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.994",
    pages = "16021--16034",
    abstract = "The use of spontaneous language to derive appropriate digital markers has become an emergent, promising and non-intrusive method to diagnose and monitor dementia. Here we propose methods to capture language coherence as a cost-effective, human-interpretable digital marker for monitoring cognitive changes in people with dementia. We introduce a novel task to learn the temporal logical consistency of utterances in short transcribed narratives and investigate a range of neural approaches. We compare such language coherence patterns between people with dementia and healthy controls and conduct a longitudinal evaluation against three clinical bio-markers to investigate the reliability of our proposed digital coherence marker. The coherence marker shows a significant difference between people with mild cognitive impairment, those with Alzheimer`s Disease and healthy controls. Moreover our analysis shows high association between the coherence marker and the clinical bio-markers as well as generalisability potential to other related conditions."
}