Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser
Ivan Nenchev, Tatjana Scheffler, Marie de la Fuente, Heiner Stuke, Benjamin Wilck, Sandra Anna Just, Christiane Montag
Abstract
We present a study of the linguistic output of the German-speaking writer Robert Walser using NLP. We curated a corpus comprising texts written by Walser during periods of sound health, and writings from the year before his hospitalization, and writings from the first year of his stay in a psychiatric clinic, all likely at- tributed to schizophrenia. Within this corpus, we identified and analyzed a total of 20 lin- guistic markers encompassing established met- rics for lexical diversity, semantic similarity, and syntactic complexity. Additionally, we ex- plored lesser-known markers such as lexical innovation, concreteness, and imageability. No- tably, we introduced two additional markers for phonological similarity for the first time within this context. Our findings reveal sig- nificant temporal dynamics in these markers closely associated with Walser’s contempora- neous diagnosis of schizophrenia. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between these markers, leveraging them for classification of the schizophrenic episode.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.clpsych-1.4
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julians, Malta
- Editors:
- Andrew Yates, Bart Desmet, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Ayah Zirikly, Steven Bedrick, Sean MacAvaney, Kfir Bar, Molly Ireland, Yaakov Ophir
- Venues:
- CLPsych | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 41–60
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.4
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ivan Nenchev, Tatjana Scheffler, Marie de la Fuente, Heiner Stuke, Benjamin Wilck, Sandra Anna Just, and Christiane Montag. 2024. Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024), pages 41–60, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser (Nenchev et al., CLPsych-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.clpsych-1.4.pdf