Enriching Neural Models with Targeted Features for Dementia Detection

Flavio Di Palo, Natalie Parde


Abstract
Alzheimers disease is an irreversible brain disease that slowly destroys memory skills andthinking skills leading to the need for full-time care. Early detection of Alzheimer’s dis-ease is fundamental to slow down the progress of the disease. In this work we are developing Natural Language Processing techniques to detect linguistic characteristics of patients suffering Alzheimer’s Disease and related Dementias. We are proposing a neural model based on a CNN-LSTM architecture that is able to take in consideration both long language samples and hand-crafted linguistic features to distinguish between dementia affected and healthy patients. We are exploring the effects of the introduction of an attention mechanism on both our model and the actual state of the art. Our approach is able to set a new state-of-the art on the DementiaBank dataset achieving an F1 Score of 0.929 in the Dementia patients classification Supplementary material include code to run the experiments.
Anthology ID:
P19-2042
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Fernando Alva-Manchego, Eunsol Choi, Daniel Khashabi
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
302–308
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-2042
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-2042
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Flavio Di Palo and Natalie Parde. 2019. Enriching Neural Models with Targeted Features for Dementia Detection. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 302–308, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enriching Neural Models with Targeted Features for Dementia Detection (Di Palo & Parde, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/P19-2042.pdf
Code
 flaviodipalo/AlzheimerDetection