Alzheimer's Disease Classification

This repository contains the code for the INTERSPEECH2023 paper: "Alzheimer Disease Classification through ASR-based Transcriptions: Exploring the Impact of Punctuation and Pauses"

Abstract:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the world’s leading neurodegenerative disease, which often results in communication difficulties. Analysing speech can serve as a diagnostic tool for identifying the condition. The recent ADReSS challenge provided a dataset for AD classification and highlighted the utility of manual tran- scriptions. In this study, we used the new state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model Whisper to obtain the transcriptions, which also include automatic punctuation. The classification models achieved test accuracy scores of 0.854 and 0.833 combining the pretrained FastText word embeddings and recurrent neural networks on manual and ASR transcripts respectively. Additionally, we explored the influence of including pause information and punctuation in the transcriptions. We found that punctuation only yielded minor improvements in some cases, whereas pause encoding aided AD classification for both manual and ASR transcriptions across all approaches investigated

Files and folders

• data: description of the ADReSS Challenge data, and instructions on how to obtain it.
• codes: folder with the following jupyter notebooks
  • 1_Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): transcription of the audio files using different automatic speech recognition models.
  • 2_1_Feature extraction: feature extraction and pause encoding.
  • 2_2_Machine learning: training the machine learning models based on the previous features.
  • 3_Word embeddings and neural network: pre-trained word embeddings + neural network model training.

Citation

If you find this work helpful, please cite our work as:

Gómez-Zaragozá, L., Wills, S., Tejedor-Garcia, C., Marín-Morales, J., Alcañiz, M., Strik, H. (2023) Alzheimer Disease Classification through ASR-based Transcriptions: Exploring the Impact of Punctuation and Pauses. Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023, 2403-2407, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1734

 @inproceedings{gomezzaragoza23_interspeech,
  author={Lucía Gómez-Zaragozá and Simone Wills and Cristian Tejedor-Garcia and Javier Marín-Morales and Mariano Alcañiz and Helmer Strik},
  title={{Alzheimer Disease Classification through ASR-based Transcriptions: Exploring the Impact of Punctuation and Pauses}},
  year=2023,
  booktitle={Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023},
  pages={2403--2407},
  doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1734}
}