In this paper, we exploit a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to analyze the audio data of spontaneous speech for dementia detection. A fully convolutional network accommodates speech samples with varying lengths, thus enabling us to analyze the speech sample without manual segmentation. Specifically, we first obtain the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) feature map from each participant's audio data and convert the speech classification task on audio data to an image classification task on MFCC feature maps. Then, to solve the data insufficiency problem, we apply transfer learning by adopting a pre-trained backbone Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model from the MobileNet architecture and the ImageNet dataset. We further build a convolutional layer to produce a heatmap using Otsu's method for visualization, enabling us to understand the impact of the time-series audio segments on the classification results. We demonstrate that our classification model achieves 66.7% over the testing dataset, 62.5% of the baseline model provided in the ADReSS challenge. Through the visualization technique, we can evaluate the impact of audio segments, such as filled pauses from the participants and repeated questions from the investigator, on the classification results.
The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
The ADReSS Challenge at INTERSPEECH 2020 defines a shared task through which different approaches to the automated recognition of Alzheimer's dementia based on spontaneous speech can be compared. ADReSS provides researchers with a benchmark speech dataset which has been acoustically pre-processed and balanced in terms of age and gender, defining two cognitive assessment tasks, namely: the Alzheimer's speech classification task and the neuropsychological score regression task. In the Alzheimer's speech classification task, ADReSS challenge participants create models for classifying speech as de…
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disorder, meaning that the symptoms develop gradually throughout the years. It is also the main cause of dementia, which affects memory, thinking skills, and mental abilities. Nowadays, researchers have moved their interest towards AD detection from spontaneous speech, since it constitutes a time-effective procedure. However, existing state-of-the-art works proposing multimodal approaches do not take into consideration the inter- and intra-modal interactions and propose early and late fusion approaches. To tackle these limitations, we prop…
Benchmarking Foundation Speech and Language Models for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Detection from Spontaneous Speech
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Shandong Mental Health Center（山东精神卫生中心）；University of Texas Rio Grande Valley（德克萨斯大学里奥格兰德河谷分校）；Kennesaw State University（肯尼索州立大学）
BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus（Birla技术与科学学院皮拉尼校区 K.K. Birla果阿校区）；IEMN Université de Lille（里尔大学微电子与纳米技术研究所）
Alzheimers disease is a fatal progressive brain disorder that worsens with time. It is high time we have inexpensive and quick clinical diagnostic techniques for early detection and care. In previous studies, various Machine Learning techniques and Pre-trained Deep Learning models have been used in conjunction with the extraction of various acoustic and linguistic features. Our study focuses on three models for the classification task in the ADReSS (The Alzheimers Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) 2021 Challenge. We use the well-balanced dataset provided by the ADReSS Challenge …
A Multimodal Framework for Dementia Detection via Linguistic and Acoustic Representation Learning
Decision Support Systems Laboratory, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens（决策支持系统实验室，电气与计算机工程学院，国家技术大学雅典）
Dementia classification from spontaneous speech using wrapper-based feature selection
Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä（信息科技学院，于韦斯屈莱大学）；Public Health Programme, Folkhälsan Research Center（公共卫生计划，福尔哈兰研究中心）；Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences and Gerontology Research Center, University of Jyväskylä（体育与健康科学学院及老年学研究中心，于韦斯屈莱大学）；Wellbeing Services County of Central Finland（中央芬兰福祉服务县）
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 spont…
Usher Institute, Edinburgh Medical School, The University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学爱丁堡医学院厄舍研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Information Technologies Institute, CERTH（希腊研究与技术基金会信息技术研究所）
This Signal Processing Grand Challenge (SPGC) targets a difficult automatic prediction problem of societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD). Participants were invited to employ signal processing and machine learning methods to create predictive models based on spontaneous speech data. The Challenge has been designed to assess the extent to which predictive models built based on speech in one language (English) generalise to another language (Greek). To the best of our knowledge no work has investigated acoustic features of the speech signal in multiling…
We present an approach to automatic detection of Alzheimer's type dementia based on characteristics of spontaneous spoken language dialogue consisting of interviews recorded in natural settings. The proposed method employs additive logistic regression (a machine learning boosting method) on content-free features extracted from dialogical interaction to build a predictive model. The model training data consisted of 21 dialogues between patients with Alzheimer's and interviewers, and 17 dialogues between patients with other health conditions and interviewers. Features analysed included speech ra…
Alzheimer's disease is estimated to affect around 50 million people worldwide and is rising rapidly, with a global economic burden of nearly a trillion dollars. This calls for scalable, cost-effective, and robust methods for detection of Alzheimer's dementia (AD). We present a novel architecture that leverages acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic features to form a multimodal ensemble system. It uses specialized artificial neural networks with temporal characteristics to detect AD and its severity, which is reflected through Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) scores. We first evaluate it on the ADRe…
RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
In this paper, we combined linguistic complexity and (dis)fluency features with pretrained language models for the task of Alzheimer's disease detection of the 2021 ADReSSo (Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) challenge. An accuracy of 83.1% was achieved on the test set, which amounts to an improvement of 4.23% over the baseline model. Our best-performing model that integrated component models using a stacking ensemble technique performed equally well on cross-validation and test data, indicating that it is robust against overfitting.
Institute of Health Informatics, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学健康信息学研究所）；Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington（华盛顿大学生物医学信息学与医学教育系）；Department of Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学药物护理与卫生系统系）
Linguistic anomalies detectable in spontaneous speech have shown promise for various clinical applications including screening for dementia and other forms of cognitive impairment. The feasibility of deploying automated tools that can classify language samples obtained from speech in large-scale clinical settings depends on the ability to capture and automatically transcribe the speech for subsequent analysis. However, the impressive performance of self-supervised learning (SSL) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models with curated speech data is not apparent with challenging speech samples f…
PROCESS-2: A Benchmark Speech Corpus for Early Cognitive Impairment Detection
School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学计算机科学学院）；Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德转化神经科学研究所）
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is nowadays the most common form of dementia, and its automatic detection can help to identify symptoms at early stages, so that preventive actions can be carried out. Moreover, non-intrusive techniques based on spoken data are crucial for the development of AD automatic detection systems. In this light, this paper is presented as a contribution to the ADReSS Challenge, aiming at improving AD automatic detection from spontaneous speech. To this end, recordings from 108 participants, which are age-, gender-, and AD condition-balanced, have been used as training set to p…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Time-frequency (T-F) domain masking is a mainstream approach for single-channel speech enhancement. Recently, focuses have been put to phase prediction in addition to amplitude prediction. In this paper, we propose a phase-and-harmonics-aware deep neural network (DNN), named PHASEN, for this task. Unlike previous methods that directly use a complex ideal ratio mask to supervise the DNN learning, we design a two-stream network, where amplitude stream and phase stream are dedicated to amplitude and phase prediction. We discover that the two streams should communicate with each other, and this is…
