The PARLO Dementia Corpus: A German Multi-Center Resource for Alzheimer’s Disease

Franziska Braun, Christopher Witzl, Florian Hönig, Elmar Nöth, Tobias Bocklet, Korbinian Riedhammer


Abstract
Early and accessible detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains a major challenge, as current diagnostic methods often rely on costly and invasive biomarkers. Speech and language analysis has emerged as a promising non-invasive and scalable approach to detecting cognitive impairment, but research in this area is hindered by the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for languages other than English. This paper introduces the PARLO Dementia Corpus (PDC), a new multi-center, clinically validated German resource for AD collected across nine academic memory clinics in Germany. The dataset comprises speech recordings from individuals with AD-related mild cognitive impairment and mild to moderate dementia, as well as cognitively healthy controls. Speech was elicited using a standardized test battery of eight neuropsychological tasks, including confrontation naming, verbal fluency, word repetition, picture description, story reading, and recall tasks. In addition to audio recordings, the dataset includes manually verified transcriptions and detailed demographic, clinical, and biomarker metadata. Baseline experiments on ASR benchmarking, automated test evaluation, and LLM-based classification illustrate the feasibility of automatic, speech-based cognitive assessment and highlight the diagnostic value of recall-driven speech production. The PDC thus establishes the first publicly available German benchmark for multi-modal and cross-lingual research on neurodegenerative diseases.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.753
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
9581–9591
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-753
DOI:
10.63317/5eo6ayamaqnq
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Franziska Braun, Christopher Witzl, Florian Hönig, Elmar Nöth, Tobias Bocklet, and Korbinian Riedhammer. 2026. The PARLO Dementia Corpus: A German Multi-Center Resource for Alzheimer’s Disease. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 9581–9591, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
The PARLO Dementia Corpus: A German Multi-Center Resource for Alzheimer’s Disease (Braun et al., LREC 2026)
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