Comparing natural language processing techniques for Alzheimer's dementia prediction in spontaneous speech

TY - CHAP

T1 - Comparing natural language processing techniques for Alzheimer's dementia prediction in spontaneous speech

AU - Searle, Thomas

AU - Ibrahim, Zina

AU - Dobson, Richard

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) is an incurable, debilitating, and progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects cognitive function. Early diagnosis is important as therapeutics can delay progression and give those diagnosed vital time. Developing models that analyse spontaneous speech could eventually provide an efficient diagnostic modality for earlier diagnosis of AD. The Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech task offers acoustically pre-processed and balanced datasets for the classification and prediction of AD and associated phenotypes through the modelling of spontaneous speech. We exclusively analyse the supplied textual transcripts of the spontaneous speech dataset, building and comparing performance across numerous models for the classification of AD vs controls and the prediction of Mental Mini State Exam scores. We rigorously train and evaluate Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT), and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) alongside deep learning Transformer based models. We find our top performing models to be a simple Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectoriser as input into a SVM model and a pre-trained Transformer based model 'DistilBERT' when used as an embedding layer into simple linear models. We demonstrate test set scores of 0.81-0.82 across classification metrics and a RMSE of 4.58.

AB - Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) is an incurable, debilitating, and progressive neurodegenerative condition that affects cognitive function. Early diagnosis is important as therapeutics can delay progression and give those diagnosed vital time. Developing models that analyse spontaneous speech could eventually provide an efficient diagnostic modality for earlier diagnosis of AD. The Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech task offers acoustically pre-processed and balanced datasets for the classification and prediction of AD and associated phenotypes through the modelling of spontaneous speech. We exclusively analyse the supplied textual transcripts of the spontaneous speech dataset, building and comparing performance across numerous models for the classification of AD vs controls and the prediction of Mental Mini State Exam scores. We rigorously train and evaluate Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDT), and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) alongside deep learning Transformer based models. We find our top performing models to be a simple Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectoriser as input into a SVM model and a pre-trained Transformer based model 'DistilBERT' when used as an embedding layer into simple linear models. We demonstrate test set scores of 0.81-0.82 across classification metrics and a RMSE of 4.58.

KW - Adress shared task

KW - Alzheimers dementia classification

KW - Spontaneous speech classification

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85098132719&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2729

DO - 10.21437/Interspeech.2020-2729

M3 - Conference paper

AN - SCOPUS:85098132719

VL - 2020-October

T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH

SP - 2192

EP - 2196

BT - Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH

T2 - 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 2020

Y2 - 25 October 2020 through 29 October 2020

ER -