Automatic Identification of Alzheimer's Disease using Lexical Features extracted from Language Samples

Objective: this study has a twofold goal. First, it aims to improve the understanding of the impact of Dementia of type Alzheimer's Disease (AD) on different aspects of the lexicon. Second, it aims to demonstrate that such aspects of the lexicon, when used as features of a machine learning classifier, can help achieve state-of-the-art performance in automatically identifying language samples produced by patients with AD. Methods: data is derived from the ADDreSS challenge, which is a part of the DementiaBank corpus. The used dataset consists of transcripts of Cookie Theft picture descriptions, produced by 54 subjects in the training part and 24 subjects in the test part. The number of narrative samples is 108 in the training set and 48 in the test set. First, the impact of AD on 99 selected lexical features is studied using both the training and testing parts of the dataset. Then some machine learning experiments were conducted on the task of classifying transcribed speech samples with text samples that were produced by people with AD from those produced by normal subjects. Several experiments were conducted to compare the different areas of lexical complexity, identify the subset of features that help achieve optimal performance, and study the impact of the size of the input on the classification. To evaluate the generalization of the models built on narrative speech, two generalization tests were conducted using written data from two British authors, Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie, and the transcription of some speeches by former President Ronald Reagan. Results: using lexical features only, state-of-the-art classification, F1 and accuracies, of over 91% were achieved in categorizing language samples produced by individuals with AD from the ones produced by healthy control subjects. This confirms the substantial impact of AD on lexicon processing.