TY - GEN
T1 - A Verbal Thermometer for Assessing Neurodegenerative Disease
T2 - 42nd Annual International Conferences of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2020
AU - Jarrold, William
AU - Rofes, Adria
AU - Wilson, Stephen
AU - Pressman, Peter
AU - Stabler, Edward
AU - Gorno-Tempini, Marilu
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/7
Y1 - 2020/7
N2 - Clinicians often use speech to characterize neurodegenerative disorders. Such characterizations require clinical judgment, which is subjective and can require extensive training. Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA) can be used to obtain objective quantifiable assessments of patient functioning. However, such human-based analyses of speech are costly and time consuming. Inexpensive off-the-shelf technologies such as speech recognition and part of speech taggers may avoid these problems. This study evaluates the ability of an automatic speech to text transcription system and a part of speech tagger to assist with measuring pronoun and verb ratios, measures based on QPA. Five participant groups provided spontaneous speech samples. One group consisted of healthy controls, while the remaining groups represented four subtypes of frontotemporal dementia. Findings indicated measurement of pronoun and verb ratio was robust despite errors introduced by automatic transcription and the tagger and despite these off-the-shelf products not having been trained on the language obtained from speech of the included population.
AB - Clinicians often use speech to characterize neurodegenerative disorders. Such characterizations require clinical judgment, which is subjective and can require extensive training. Quantitative Production Analysis (QPA) can be used to obtain objective quantifiable assessments of patient functioning. However, such human-based analyses of speech are costly and time consuming. Inexpensive off-the-shelf technologies such as speech recognition and part of speech taggers may avoid these problems. This study evaluates the ability of an automatic speech to text transcription system and a part of speech tagger to assist with measuring pronoun and verb ratios, measures based on QPA. Five participant groups provided spontaneous speech samples. One group consisted of healthy controls, while the remaining groups represented four subtypes of frontotemporal dementia. Findings indicated measurement of pronoun and verb ratio was robust despite errors introduced by automatic transcription and the tagger and despite these off-the-shelf products not having been trained on the language obtained from speech of the included population.
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U2 - 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176185
DO - 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176185
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85091001102
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
SP - 5831
EP - 5837
BT - 42nd Annual International Conferences of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 20 July 2020 through 24 July 2020
ER -