In the last decade, a rapidly growing body of studies has shown promising results for the automatic detection and extraction of speech and language features as biomarkers of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. This has sparked great optimism and the development of various digital health tools, but also warnings regarding the predominance of English in the field and calls for linguistically diverse research as well as global, equitable access to novel clinical instruments. To automatically extract clinically relevant features from transcripts in low-resource languages, two approaches are possible: 1) utilizing a limited range of language-specific tools or 2) translating text to English and then extracting the features. We evaluate these approaches for part-of-speech (POS) rates in transcripts of recorded picture descriptions from a cross-sectional study of Icelandic speakers at different stages of Alzheimer’s disease and healthy controls. While the translation method merits further exploration, only a subset of the POS categories show a promising correspondence to the direct extraction from the Icelandic transcripts in our results, indicating that the translation method has to be linguistically validated at the individual POS category level.

Detecting duplicate patient participation in clinical trials is a major challenge because repeated patients can undermine the credibility and accuracy of the trial’s findings and result in significant health and financial risks. Developing accurate automated speaker verification (ASV) models is crucial to verify the identity of enrolled individuals and remove duplicates, but the size and quality of data influence ASV performance. However, there has been limited investigation into the factors that can affect ASV capabilities in clinical environments. In this paper, we bridge the gap by conducting analysis of how participant demographic characteristics, audio quality criteria, and severity level of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) impact the performance of ASV utilizing a dataset of speech recordings from 659 participants with varying levels of AD, obtained through multiple speech tasks. Our results indicate that ASV performance: 1) is slightly better on male speakers than on female speakers; 2) degrades for individuals who are above 70 years old; 3) is comparatively better for non-native English speakers than for native English speakers; 4) is negatively affected by clinician interference, noisy background, and unclear participant speech; 5) tends to decrease with an increase in the severity level of AD. Our study finds that voice biometrics raise fairness concerns as certain subgroups exhibit different ASV performances owing to their inherent voice characteristics. Moreover, the performance of ASV is influenced by the quality of speech recordings, which underscores the importance of improving the data collection settings in clinical trials.

Mental distress like depression and anxiety contribute to the largest proportion of the global burden of diseases. Automated diagnosis system of such disorders, empowered by recent innovations in Artificial Intelligence, can pave the way to reduce the sufferings of the affected individuals. Development of such systems requires information-rich and balanced corpora. In this work, we introduce a novel mental distress analysis audio dataset DEPAC, labelled based on established thresholds on depression and anxiety standard screening tools. This large dataset comprises multiple speech tasks per individual, as well as relevant demographic information. Alongside, we present a feature set consisting of hand-curated acoustic and linguistic features, which were found effective in identifying signs of mental illnesses in human speech. Finally, we justify the quality and effectiveness of our proposed audio corpus and feature set in predicting depression severity by comparing the performance of baseline machine learning models built on this dataset with baseline models trained on other well-known depression corpora.

Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances. We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other’s work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

A significant number of studies apply acoustic and linguistic characteristics of human speech as prominent markers of dementia and depression. However, studies on discriminating depression from dementia are rare. Co-morbid depression is frequent in dementia and these clinical conditions share many overlapping symptoms, but the ability to distinguish between depression and dementia is essential as depression is often curable. In this work, we investigate the ability of clustering approaches in distinguishing between depression and dementia from human speech. We introduce a novel aggregated dataset, which combines narrative speech data from multiple conditions, i.e., Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, healthy control, and depression. We compare linear and non-linear clustering approaches and show that non-linear clustering techniques distinguish better between distinct disease clusters. Our interpretability analysis shows that the main differentiating symptoms between dementia and depression are acoustic abnormality, repetitiveness (or circularity) of speech, word finding difficulty, coherence impairment, and differences in lexical complexity and richness.

Research related to automatically detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is important, given the high prevalence of AD and the high cost of traditional methods. Since AD significantly affects the acoustics of spontaneous speech, speech processing and machine learning (ML) provide promising techniques for reliably detecting AD. However, speech audio may be affected by different types of background noise and it is important to understand how the noise influences the accuracy of ML models detecting AD from speech. In this paper, we study the effect of fifteen types of environmental noise from five different categories on the performance of four ML models trained with three types of acoustic representations. We perform a thorough analysis showing how ML models and acoustic features are affected by different types of acoustic noise. We show that acoustic noise is not necessarily harmful - certain types of noise are beneficial for AD detection models and help increasing accuracy by up to 4.8%. We provide recommendations on how to utilize acoustic noise in order to achieve the best performance results with the ML models deployed in real world.

Understanding robustness and sensitivity of BERT models predicting Alzheimer’s disease from text is important for both developing better classification models and for understanding their capabilities and limitations. In this paper, we analyze how a controlled amount of desired and undesired text alterations impacts performance of BERT. We show that BERT is robust to natural linguistic variations in text. On the other hand, we show that BERT is not sensitive to removing clinically important information from text.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a critical component of any fully-automated speech-based dementia detection model. However, despite years of speech recognition research, little is known about the impact of ASR accuracy on dementia detection. In this paper, we experiment with controlled amounts of artificially generated ASR errors and investigate their influence on dementia detection. We find that deletion errors affect detection performance the most, due to their impact on the features of syntactic complexity and discourse representation in speech. We show the trend to be generalisable across two different datasets for cognitive impairment detection. As a conclusion, we propose optimising the ASR to reflect a higher penalty for deletion errors in order to improve dementia detection performance.

Despite the widely reported success of embedding-based machine learning methods on natural language processing tasks, the use of more easily interpreted engineered features remains common in fields such as cognitive impairment (CI) detection. Manually engineering features from noisy text is time and resource consuming, and can potentially result in features that do not enhance model performance. To combat this, we describe a new approach to feature engineering that leverages sequential machine learning models and domain knowledge to predict which features help enhance performance. We provide a concrete example of this method on a standard data set of CI speech and demonstrate that CI classification accuracy improves by 2.3% over a strong baseline when using features produced by this method. This demonstration provides an example of how this method can be used to assist classification in fields where interpretability is important, such as health care.

Linguistic features have shown promising applications for detecting various cognitive impairments. To improve detection accuracies, increasing the amount of data or the number of linguistic features have been two applicable approaches. However, acquiring additional clinical data can be expensive, and hand-crafting features is burdensome. In this paper, we take a third approach, proposing Consensus Networks (CNs), a framework to classify after reaching agreements between modalities. We divide linguistic features into non-overlapping subsets according to their modalities, and let neural networks learn low-dimensional representations that agree with each other. These representations are passed into a classifier network. All neural networks are optimized iteratively. In this paper, we also present two methods that improve the performance of CNs. We then present ablation studies to illustrate the effectiveness of modality division. To understand further what happens in CNs, we visualize the representations during training. Overall, using all of the 413 linguistic features, our models significantly outperform traditional classifiers, which are used by the state-of-the-art papers.

Understanding the vulnerability of linguistic features extracted from noisy text is important for both developing better health text classification models and for interpreting vulnerabilities of natural language models. In this paper, we investigate how generic language characteristics, such as syntax or the lexicon, are impacted by artificial text alterations. The vulnerability of features is analysed from two perspectives: (1) the level of feature value change, and (2) the level of change of feature predictive power as a result of text modifications. We show that lexical features are more sensitive to text modifications than syntactic ones. However, we also demonstrate that these smaller changes of syntactic features have a stronger influence on classification performance downstream, compared to the impact of changes to lexical features. Results are validated across three datasets representing different text-classification tasks, with different levels of lexical and syntactic complexity of both conversational and written language.

Human evaluation for natural language generation (NLG) often suffers from inconsistent user ratings. While previous research tends to attribute this problem to individual user preferences, we show that the quality of human judgements can also be improved by experimental design. We present a novel rank-based magnitude estimation method (RankME), which combines the use of continuous scales and relative assessments. We show that RankME significantly improves the reliability and consistency of human ratings compared to traditional evaluation methods. In addition, we show that it is possible to evaluate NLG systems according to multiple, distinct criteria, which is important for error analysis. Finally, we demonstrate that RankME, in combination with Bayesian estimation of system quality, is a cost-effective alternative for ranking multiple NLG systems.

This paper summarises the experimental setup and results of the first shared task on end-to-end (E2E) natural language generation (NLG) in spoken dialogue systems. Recent end-to-end generation systems are promising since they reduce the need for data annotation. However, they are currently limited to small, delexicalised datasets. The E2E NLG shared task aims to assess whether these novel approaches can generate better-quality output by learning from a dataset containing higher lexical richness, syntactic complexity and diverse discourse phenomena. We compare 62 systems submitted by 17 institutions, covering a wide range of approaches, including machine learning architectures – with the majority implementing sequence-to-sequence models (seq2seq) – as well as systems based on grammatical rules and templates.

The majority of NLG evaluation relies on automatic metrics, such as BLEU . In this paper, we motivate the need for novel, system- and data-independent automatic evaluation methods: We investigate a wide range of metrics, including state-of-the-art word-based and novel grammar-based ones, and demonstrate that they only weakly reflect human judgements of system outputs as generated by data-driven, end-to-end NLG. We also show that metric performance is data- and system-specific. Nevertheless, our results also suggest that automatic metrics perform reliably at system-level and can support system development by finding cases where a system performs poorly.

Recognition of social signals, coming from human facial expressions or prosody of human speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics. However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue, correlate with users’ impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find that happiness in the user’s recognised facial expression strongly correlates with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that the facial expression emotional features and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning-based adaptive human-robot dialogue systems.

This paper describes the E2E data, a new dataset for training end-to-end, data-driven natural language generation systems in the restaurant domain, which is ten times bigger than existing, frequently used datasets in this area. The E2E dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference texts show more lexical richness and syntactic variation, including discourse phenomena; (2) generating from this set requires content selection. As such, learning from this dataset promises more natural, varied and less template-like system utterances. We also establish a baseline on this dataset, which illustrates some of the difficulties associated with this data.

This paper describes a novel experimental setup exploiting state-of-the-art capture equipment to collect a multimodally rich game-solving collaborative multiparty dialogue corpus. The corpus is targeted and designed towards the development of a dialogue system platform to explore verbal and nonverbal tutoring strategies in multiparty spoken interactions. The dialogue task is centered on two participants involved in a dialogue aiming to solve a card-ordering game. The participants were paired into teams based on their degree of extraversion as resulted from a personality test. With the participants sits a tutor that helps them perform the task, organizes and balances their interaction and whose behavior was assessed by the participants after each interaction. Different multimodal signals captured and auto-synchronized by different audio-visual capture technologies, together with manual annotations of the tutor’s behavior constitute the Tutorbot corpus. This corpus is exploited to build a situated model of the interaction based on the participants’ temporally-changing state of attention, their conversational engagement and verbal dominance, and their correlation with the verbal and visual feedback and conversation regulatory actions generated by the tutor.