Christopher Rashidian
2026
DementiaBank-Emotion: A Multi-Rater Emotion Annotation Corpus for Alzheimer’s Disease Speech (Version 1.0)
Cheonkam Jeong | Jessica Liao | Audrey Lu | Yutong Song | Christopher Rashidian | Donna Krogh | Erik Krogh | Mahkameh Rasouli | Jung-Ah Lee | Nikil Dutt | Lisa M Gibbs | David Sultzer | Julie Rousseau | Jocelyn Ludlow | Margaret Galvez | Alexander Nuth | Chet Khay | Sabine Brunswicker | Adeline Nyamathi
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026)
Cheonkam Jeong | Jessica Liao | Audrey Lu | Yutong Song | Christopher Rashidian | Donna Krogh | Erik Krogh | Mahkameh Rasouli | Jung-Ah Lee | Nikil Dutt | Lisa M Gibbs | David Sultzer | Julie Rousseau | Jocelyn Ludlow | Margaret Galvez | Alexander Nuth | Chet Khay | Sabine Brunswicker | Adeline Nyamathi
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Linguistic Analysis for Health (HeaLing 2026)
We present DementiaBank-Emotion, the first multi-rater emotion annotation corpus for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) speech. Annotating 1,492 utterances from 108 speakers for Ekman’s six basic emotions and neutral, we find that AD patients express significantly more non-neutral emotions (16.9%) than healthy controls (5.7%; p < .001). Exploratory acoustic analysis suggests a possible dissociation: control speakers showed substantial F0 modulation for sadness (Delta = -3.45 semitones from baseline), whereas AD speakers showed minimal change (Delta = +0.11 semitones; interaction p = .023), though this finding is based on limited samples (sadness: n=5 control, n=15 AD) and requires replication. Within AD speech, loudness differentiates emotion categories, indicating partially preserved emotion-prosody mappings. We release the corpus, annotation guidelines, and calibration workshop materials to support research on emotion recognition in clinical populations.
2025
Merging Two Grammar Worlds: Exploring the Relationship between Universal Dependencies and Signal Temporal Logic
Christopher Rashidian | Sabine Brunswicker
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Christopher Rashidian | Sabine Brunswicker
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Translating natural language requirements into Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is essential for safety-critical systems but requires mathematical expertise. We propose a translational grammar mapping Universal Dependencies (UD) structures to STL Operators through 17 theoretically-motivated patterns, evaluated on the NL2TL benchmarking dataset of 7,002 expert-annotated sentence-STL pairs, and an additional cross-domain analysis. We built a parser guided by this grammar to explore the formal deterministic relationship between UDR Compositions and STL Operators, achieving ~99% sentence coverage, ~54% exact matches (and ~97% similarity). Sentence-level regression analyses predict STL statements and STL Operator classes, considering the co-occurance of UDR substructures (UDR components) with an accuracy of more than ~74% and ~81%, respectively. They uncover a new logical grammatical link between temporal NL and formal logic, that is conditioned by the sentence-level context, and provide insights into how linguistic theory unfolds in practice through temporal linguistic expressions.