Similarity Measures for the Detection of Clinical Conditions with Verbal Fluency Tasks

Felipe Paula, Rodrigo Wilkens, Marco Idiart, Aline Villavicencio


Abstract
Semantic Verbal Fluency tests have been used in the detection of certain clinical conditions, like Dementia. In particular, given a sequence of semantically related words, a large number of switches from one semantic class to another has been linked to clinical conditions. In this work, we investigate three similarity measures for automatically identifying switches in semantic chains: semantic similarity from a manually constructed resource, and word association strength and semantic relatedness, both calculated from corpora. This information is used for building classifiers to distinguish healthy controls from clinical cases with early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Deficits. The overall results indicate that for clinical conditions the classifiers that use these similarity measures outperform those that use a gold standard taxonomy.
Anthology ID:
N18-2037
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
231–235
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2037
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-2037
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felipe Paula, Rodrigo Wilkens, Marco Idiart, and Aline Villavicencio. 2018. Similarity Measures for the Detection of Clinical Conditions with Verbal Fluency Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), pages 231–235, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Similarity Measures for the Detection of Clinical Conditions with Verbal Fluency Tasks (Paula et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2037.pdf