Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser

Ivan Nenchev, Tatjana Scheffler, Marie de la Fuente, Heiner Stuke, Benjamin Wilck, Sandra Anna Just, Christiane Montag


Abstract
We present a study of the linguistic output of the German-speaking writer Robert Walser using NLP. We curated a corpus comprising texts written by Walser during periods of sound health, and writings from the year before his hospitalization, and writings from the first year of his stay in a psychiatric clinic, all likely at- tributed to schizophrenia. Within this corpus, we identified and analyzed a total of 20 lin- guistic markers encompassing established met- rics for lexical diversity, semantic similarity, and syntactic complexity. Additionally, we ex- plored lesser-known markers such as lexical innovation, concreteness, and imageability. No- tably, we introduced two additional markers for phonological similarity for the first time within this context. Our findings reveal sig- nificant temporal dynamics in these markers closely associated with Walser’s contempora- neous diagnosis of schizophrenia. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between these markers, leveraging them for classification of the schizophrenic episode.
Anthology ID:
2024.clpsych-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Andrew Yates, Bart Desmet, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Ayah Zirikly, Steven Bedrick, Sean MacAvaney, Kfir Bar, Molly Ireland, Yaakov Ophir
Venues:
CLPsych | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
41–60
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ivan Nenchev, Tatjana Scheffler, Marie de la Fuente, Heiner Stuke, Benjamin Wilck, Sandra Anna Just, and Christiane Montag. 2024. Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024), pages 41–60, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser (Nenchev et al., CLPsych-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.4.pdf