Autism Detection in Speech – A Survey

Nadine Probol, Margot Mieskes


Abstract
There has been a range of studies of how autism is displayed in voice, speech, and language. We analyse studies from the biomedical, as well as the psychological domain, but also from the NLP domain in order to find linguistic, prosodic and acoustic cues. Our survey looks at all three domains. We define autism and which comorbidities might influence the correct detection of the disorder. We especially look at observations such as verbal and semantic fluency, prosodic features, but also disfluencies and speaking rate. We also show word-based approaches and describe machine learning and transformer-based approaches both on the audio data as well as the transcripts. Lastly, we conclude, while there already is a lot of research, female patients seem to be severely under-researched. Also, most NLP research focuses on traditional machine learning methods instead of transformers. Additionally, we were unable to find research combining both features from audio and transcripts.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-eacl.75
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1115–1125
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.75
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nadine Probol and Margot Mieskes. 2024. Autism Detection in Speech – A Survey. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 1115–1125, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Autism Detection in Speech – A Survey (Probol & Mieskes, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.75.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.75.mp4