Characterization of Divergence in Impaired Speech of ALS Patients

Archna Bhatia, Bonnie Dorr, Kristy Hollingshead, Samuel L. Phillips, Barbara McKenzie


Abstract
Approximately 80% to 95% of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) eventually develop speech impairments, such as defective articulation, slow laborious speech and hypernasality. The relationship between impaired speech and asymptomatic speech may be seen as a divergence from a baseline. This relationship can be characterized in terms of measurable combinations of phonological characteristics that are indicative of the degree to which the two diverge. We demonstrate that divergence measurements based on phonological characteristics of speech correlate with physiological assessments of ALS. Speech-based assessments offer benefits over commonly-used physiological assessments in that they are inexpensive, non-intrusive, and do not require trained clinical personnel for administering and interpreting the results.
Anthology ID:
W17-2318
Volume:
BioNLP 2017
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada,
Editors:
Kevin Bretonnel Cohen, Dina Demner-Fushman, Sophia Ananiadou, Junichi Tsujii
Venue:
BioNLP
SIG:
SIGBIOMED
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
149–158
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2318
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2318
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Archna Bhatia, Bonnie Dorr, Kristy Hollingshead, Samuel L. Phillips, and Barbara McKenzie. 2017. Characterization of Divergence in Impaired Speech of ALS Patients. In BioNLP 2017, pages 149–158, Vancouver, Canada,. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Characterization of Divergence in Impaired Speech of ALS Patients (Bhatia et al., BioNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W17-2318.pdf