Integrating Pause Information with Word Embeddings in Language Models for Alzheimer's Disease Detection from Spontaneous Speech

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by cognitive decline and memory loss. Early detection of AD is crucial for effective intervention and treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to AD detection from spontaneous speech, which incorporates pause information into language models. Our method involves encoding pause information into embeddings and integrating them into the typical transformer-based language model, enabling it to capture both semantic and temporal features of speech data. We conduct experiments on the Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech (ADReSS) dataset and its extension, the ADReSSo dataset, comparing our method with existing approaches. Our method achieves an accuracy of 83.1% in the ADReSSo test set. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in discriminating between AD patients and healthy individuals, highlighting the potential of pauses as a valuable indicator for AD detection. By leveraging speech analysis as a non-invasive and cost-effective tool for AD detection, our research contributes to early diagnosis and improved management of this debilitating disease.

Improving Whisper's Recognition Performance for Under-Represented Language Kazakh Leveraging Unpaired Speech and Text

Whisper and other large-scale automatic speech recognition models have made significant progress in performance. However, their performance on many low-resource languages, such as Kazakh, is not satisfactory. It is worth researching how to utilize low-cost data to improve the performance of Whisper on under-represented languages. In this study, we utilized easily accessible unpaired speech and text data and combined the language model GPT with Whisper on Kazakh. We implemented end of transcript (EOT) judgment modification and hallucination penalty to improve the performance of speech recognition. Further, we employed the decoding average token log probability as a criterion to select samples from unlabeled speech data and used pseudo-labeled data to fine-tune the model to further improve its performance. Ultimately, we achieved more than 10\% absolute WER reduction in multiple experiments, and the whole process has the potential to be generalized to other under-represented languages.

Cross-lingual Alzheimer's Disease detection based on paralinguistic and pre-trained features

We present our submission to the ICASSP-SPGC-2023 ADReSS-M Challenge Task, which aims to investigate which acoustic features can be generalized and transferred across languages for Alzheimer's Disease (AD) prediction. The challenge consists of two tasks: one is to classify the speech of AD patients and healthy individuals, and the other is to infer Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) score based on speech only. The difficulty is mainly embodied in the mismatch of the dataset, in which the training set is in English while the test set is in Greek. We extract paralinguistic features using openSmile toolkit and acoustic features using XLSR-53. In addition, we extract linguistic features after transcribing the speech into text. These features are used as indicators for AD detection in our method. Our method achieves an accuracy of 69.6% on the classification task and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 4.788 on the regression task. The results show that our proposed method is expected to achieve automatic multilingual Alzheimer's Disease detection through spontaneous speech.