This repository contains the data and code for the paper "Breaking Barriers: Exploring the Diagnostic Potential of Speech Narratives in Hindi for Alzheimer’s Disease", accepted for publication at the 2023 Clinical NLP Workshop, Conference on Association for Computational Linguistics(ACL).
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects cognitive abilities and memory, especially in older adults. One of the challenges of AD is that it can be difficult to diagnose in its early stages. However, recent research has shown that changes in language, including speech decline and difficulty in processing information, can be important indicators of AD and may help with early detection. Hence, the speech narratives of the patients can be useful in diagnosing the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. While the previous works have presented the potential of using speech narratives to diagnose AD in high-resource languages, this work explores the possibility of using a low-resourced language i.e. Hindi language for the diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we present a dataset specifically for analyzing AD in the Hindi language along with experimental results using various state-of-the-art algorithms to assess the diagnostic potential of speech narratives in Hindi. Our analysis suggests that speech narratives in the Hindi language have the potential to aid in the diagnosis of AD. Our dataset and code are made publicly available.
For translated dataset, users need to have access to DementiaBank and if they need translated version, they can send us an email. Please consult DementiaBank (https://dementia.talkbank.org/) for more details on how to access and use their data.
If you decide to use this dataset please cite the following paper.
@inproceedings{rauniyar2023breaking,
title={Breaking Barriers: Exploring the Diagnostic Potential of Speech Narratives in Hindi for Alzheimer’s Disease},
author={Rauniyar, Kritesh and Shiwakoti, Shuvam and Poudel, Sweta and Thapa, Surendrabikram and Naseem, Usman and Nasim, Mehwish},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop},
pages={24--30},
year={2023}
}