Automatic prediction of linguistic decline in writings of subjects with degenerative dementia

Weissenbacher Davy, Johnson A. Travis, Wojtulewicz Laura, Dueck Amylou, Locke Dona, Caselli Richard, Gonzalez Graciela

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Given the limited success of medication in reversing the effects of Alzheimer's and other dementias, a lot of the neuroscience research has been focused on early detection, in order to slow the progress of the disease through different interventions. We propose a Natural Language Processing approach applied to descriptive writing to attempt to discriminate decline due to normal aging from decline due to predementia conditions. Within the context of a longitudinal study on Alzheimer's disease, we created a unique corpus of 201 descriptions of a control image written by subjects of the study. Our classifier, computing linguistic features, was able to discriminate normal from cognitively impaired patients to an accuracy of 86.1% using lexical and semantic irregularities found in their writing. This is a promising result towards elucidating the existence of a general pattern in linguistic deterioration caused by dementia that might be detectable from a subject's written descriptive language.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2016 - Proceedings of the Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1198-1207
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781941643914
StatePublished - 2016
Event15th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2016 - San Diego, United States
Duration: Jun 12 2016Jun 17 2016

Publication series

Name2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2016 - Proceedings of the Conference

Other

Other15th Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL HLT 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period6/12/166/17/16

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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