Marie de la Fuente


2024

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Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser
Ivan Nenchev | Tatjana Scheffler | Marie de la Fuente | Heiner Stuke | Benjamin Wilck | Sandra Anna Just | Christiane Montag
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)

We present a study of the linguistic output of the German-speaking writer Robert Walser using NLP. We curated a corpus comprising texts written by Walser during periods of sound health, and writings from the year before his hospitalization, and writings from the first year of his stay in a psychiatric clinic, all likely at- tributed to schizophrenia. Within this corpus, we identified and analyzed a total of 20 lin- guistic markers encompassing established met- rics for lexical diversity, semantic similarity, and syntactic complexity. Additionally, we ex- plored lesser-known markers such as lexical innovation, concreteness, and imageability. No- tably, we introduced two additional markers for phonological similarity for the first time within this context. Our findings reveal sig- nificant temporal dynamics in these markers closely associated with Walser’s contempora- neous diagnosis of schizophrenia. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between these markers, leveraging them for classification of the schizophrenic episode.