Harnessing Linguistic Analysis for ADHD Diagnosis Support: A Stylometric Approach to Self-Defining Memories

Florian Raphaël Cafiero, Juan Barrios Rudloff, Simon Gabay


Abstract
This study explores the potential of stylometric analysis in identifying Self-Defining Memories (SDMs) authored by individuals with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) versus a control group. A sample of 198 SDMs were written by 66 adolescents and were then analysed using Support Vector Classifiers (SVC). The analysis included a variety of linguistic features such as character 3-grams, function words, sentence length, or lexical richness among others. It also included metadata about the participants (gender, age) and their SDMs (self-reported sentiment after recalling their memories). The results reveal a promising ability of linguistic analysis to accurately classify SDMs, with perfect prediction (F1=1.0) in the contextually simpler setup of text-by-text prediction, and satisfactory levels of precision (F1 = 0.77) when predicting individual by individual. Such results highlight the significant role that linguistic characteristics play in reflecting the distinctive cognitive patterns associated with ADHD. While not a substitute for professional diagnosis, textual analysis offers a supportive avenue for early detection and a deeper understanding of ADHD.
Anthology ID:
2024.rapid-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments @LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Dimitrios Kokkinakis, Kathleen C. Fraser, Charalambos K. Themistocleous, Kristina Lundholm Fors, Athanasios Tsanas, Fredrik Ohman
Venues:
RaPID | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
87–94
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.rapid-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Florian Raphaël Cafiero, Juan Barrios Rudloff, and Simon Gabay. 2024. Harnessing Linguistic Analysis for ADHD Diagnosis Support: A Stylometric Approach to Self-Defining Memories. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments @LREC-COLING 2024, pages 87–94, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Harnessing Linguistic Analysis for ADHD Diagnosis Support: A Stylometric Approach to Self-Defining Memories (Cafiero et al., RaPID-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.rapid-1.10.pdf