Fangyuan Wei


2023

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CDA: A Contrastive Data Augmentation Method for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection
Junwen Duan | Fangyuan Wei | Jin Liu | Hongdong Li | Tianming Liu | Jianxin Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that significantly impacts a patient’s ability to communicate and organize language. Traditional methods for detecting AD, such as physical screening or neurological testing, can be challenging and time-consuming. Recent research has explored the use of deep learning techniques to distinguish AD patients from non-AD patients by analysing the spontaneous speech. These models, however, are limited by the availability of data. To address this, we propose a novel contrastive data augmentation method, which simulates the cognitive impairment of a patient by randomly deleting a proportion of text from the transcript to create negative samples. The corrupted samples are expected to be in worse conditions than the original by a margin. Experimental results on the benchmark ADReSS Challenge dataset demonstrate that our model achieves the best performance among language-based models.