An Assessment of Paralinguistic Acoustic Features for Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia in Spontaneous Speech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Speech analysis could provide an indicator of Alzheimer's disease and help develop clinical tools for automatically detecting and monitoring disease progression. While previous studies have employed acoustic (speech) features for characterisation of Alzheimer's dementia, these studies focused on a few common prosodic features, often in combination with lexical and syntactic features which require transcription. We present a detailed study of the predictive value of purely acoustic features automatically extracted from spontaneous speech for Alzheimer's dementia detection, from a computational paralinguistics perspective. The effectiveness of several state-of-the-art paralinguistic feature sets for Alzheimer's detection were assessed on a balanced sample of DementiaBank's Pitt spontaneous speech dataset, with patients matched by gender and age. The feature sets assessed were the extended Geneva minimalistic acoustic parameter set (eGeMAPS), the emobase feature set, the ComParE 2013 feature set, and new Multi-Resolution Cochleagram (MRCG) features. Furthermore, we introduce a new active data representation (ADR) method for feature extraction in Alzheimer's dementia recognition. Results show that classification models based solely on acoustic speech features extracted through our ADR method can achieve accuracy levels comparable to those achieved by models that employ higher-level language features. Analysis of the results suggests that all feature sets contribute information not captured by other feature sets. We show that while the eGeMAPS feature set provides slightly better accuracy than other feature sets individually (71.34%), “hard fusion” of feature sets improves accuracy to 78.70%.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".