Zhiqiang Guo


2020

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Text Classification by Contrastive Learning and Cross-lingual Data Augmentation for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection
Zhiqiang Guo | Zhaoci Liu | Zhenhua Ling | Shijin Wang | Lingjing Jin | Yunxia Li
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Data scarcity is always a constraint on analyzing speech transcriptions for automatic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) detection, especially when the subjects are non-English speakers. To deal with this issue, this paper first proposes a contrastive learning method to obtain effective representations for text classification based on monolingual embeddings of BERT. Furthermore, a cross-lingual data augmentation method is designed by building autoencoders to learn the text representations shared by both languages. Experiments on a Mandarin AD corpus show that the contrastive learning method can achieve better detection accuracy than conventional CNN-based and BERTbased methods. Our cross-lingual data augmentation method also outperforms other compared methods when using another English AD corpus for augmentation. Finally, a best detection accuracy of 81.6% is obtained by our proposed methods on the Mandarin AD corpus.