Detecting Japanese Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease based on Word Category Frequencies

Daisaku Shibata, Shoko Wakamiya, Ayae Kinoshita, Eiji Aramaki


Abstract
In recent years, detecting Alzheimer disease (AD) in early stages based on natural language processing (NLP) has drawn much attention. To date, vocabulary size, grammatical complexity, and fluency have been studied using NLP metrics. However, the content analysis of AD narratives is still unreachable for NLP. This study investigates features of the words that AD patients use in their spoken language. After recruiting 18 examinees of 53–90 years old (mean: 76.89), they were divided into two groups based on MMSE scores. The AD group comprised 9 examinees with scores of 21 or lower. The healthy control group comprised 9 examinees with a score of 22 or higher. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) classified words were used to categorize the words that the examinees used. The word frequency was found from observation. Significant differences were confirmed for the usage of impersonal pronouns in the AD group. This result demonstrated the basic feasibility of the proposed NLP-based detection approach.
Anthology ID:
W16-4211
Volume:
Proceedings of the Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (ClinicalNLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Anna Rumshisky, Kirk Roberts, Steven Bethard, Tristan Naumann
Venue:
ClinicalNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
78–85
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4211
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Daisaku Shibata, Shoko Wakamiya, Ayae Kinoshita, and Eiji Aramaki. 2016. Detecting Japanese Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease based on Word Category Frequencies. In Proceedings of the Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop (ClinicalNLP), pages 78–85, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Japanese Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease based on Word Category Frequencies (Shibata et al., ClinicalNLP 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4211.pdf