Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects cognitive abilities and memory, especially in older adults. One of the challenges of AD is that it can be difficult to diagnose in its early stages. However, recent research has shown that changes in language, including speech decline and difficulty in processing information, can be important indicators of AD and may help with early detection. Hence, the speech narratives of the patients can be useful in diagnosing the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. While the previous works have presented the potential of using speech narratives to diagnose AD in high-resource languages, this work explores the possibility of using a low-resourced language, i.e., Hindi language, to diagnose AD. In this paper, we present a dataset specifically for analyzing AD in the Hindi language, along with experimental results using various state-of-the-art algorithms to assess the diagnostic potential of speech narratives in Hindi. Our analysis suggests that speech narratives in the Hindi language have the potential to aid in the diagnosis of AD. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/rkritesh210/DementiaBankHindi.

Graph-based techniques have gained traction for representing and analyzing data in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Knowledge graph-based language representation models have shown promising results in leveraging domain-specific knowledge for NLP tasks, particularly in the biomedical NLP field. However, such models have limitations, including knowledge noise and neglect of contextual relationships, leading to potential semantic errors and reduced accuracy. To address these issues, this paper proposes two novel methods. The first method combines knowledge graph-based language model with nearest-neighbor models to incorporate semantic and category information from neighboring instances. The second method involves integrating knowledge graph-based language model with graph neural networks (GNNs) to leverage feature information from neighboring nodes in the graph. Experiments on relation extraction (RE) and classification tasks in English and Chinese language datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements with both methods, highlighting their potential for enhancing the performance of language models and improving NLP applications in the biomedical domain.

Natural language processing has advanced with AI-driven language models (LMs), that are applied widely from text generation to question answering. These models are pre-trained on a wide spectrum of data sources, enhancing accuracy and responsiveness. However, this process inadvertently entails the absorption of a diverse spectrum of viewpoints inherent within the training data. Exploring political leaning within LMs due to such viewpoints remains a less-explored domain. In the context of a low-resource language like Bangla, this area of research is nearly non-existent. To bridge this gap, we comprehensively analyze biases present in Bangla language models, specifically focusing on social and economic dimensions. Our findings reveal the inclinations of various LMs, which will provide insights into ethical considerations and limitations associated with deploying Bangla LMs.