Speech and Language Biomarkers of Neurodegenerative Conditions: Developing Cross-Linguistically Valid Tools for Automatic Analysis

Iris Nowenstein, Marija Stanojevic, Gunnar Örnólfsson, María Kristín Jónsdóttir, Bill Simpson, Jennifer Sorinas Nerin, Bryndís Bergþórsdóttir, Kristín Hannesdóttir, Jekaterina Novikova, Jelena Curcic

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In the last decade, a rapidly growing body of studies has shown promising results for the automatic detection and extraction of speech and language features as biomarkers of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. This has sparked great optimism and the development of various digital health tools, but also warnings regarding the predominance of English in the field and calls for linguistically diverse research as well as global, equitable access to novel clinical instruments. To automatically extract clinically relevant features from transcripts in low-resource languages, two approaches are possible: 1) utilizing a limited range of language-specific tools or 2) translating text to English and then extracting the features. We evaluate these approaches for part-of-speech (POS) rates in transcripts of recorded picture descriptions from a cross-sectional study of Icelandic speakers at different stages of Alzheimer’s disease and healthy controls. While the translation method merits further exploration, only a subset of the POS categories show a promising correspondence to the direct extraction from the Icelandic transcripts in our results, indicating that the translation method has to be linguistically validated at the individual POS category level.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication5th RaPID Workshop
Subtitle of host publicationResources and Processing of Linguistic, Para-Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Data from People with Various Forms of Cognitive/Psychiatric/Developmental Impairments, RAPID 2024 at LREC-COLING 2024 - Workshop Proceedings
EditorsDimitrios Kokkinakis, Kathleen C. Fraser, Charalambos K. Themistocleous, Kristina Lundholm Fors, Athanasios Tsanas, Fredrik Ohman
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages26-33
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9782493814111
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event5th RaPID Workshop on Resources and Processing of Linguistic, Para-Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Data from People with Various Forms of Cognitive/Psychiatric/Developmental Impairments, RAPID 2024 - Torino, Italy
Duration: 21 May 2024 → …

Publication series

Name5th RaPID Workshop: Resources and Processing of Linguistic, Para-Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Data from People with Various Forms of Cognitive/Psychiatric/Developmental Impairments, RAPID 2024 at LREC-COLING 2024 - Workshop Proceedings

Conference

Conference5th RaPID Workshop on Resources and Processing of Linguistic, Para-Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Data from People with Various Forms of Cognitive/Psychiatric/Developmental Impairments, RAPID 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTorino
Period21/05/24 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.

Other keywords

  • Alzheimer’s disease
  • digital health
  • Icelandic
  • language-specific tools
  • linguistic diversity
  • machine translation
  • Mild Cognitive Impairment
  • neurodegeneration
  • part-of-speech (POS)
  • speech and language biomarkers

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