Conference article

Detecting semantic changes in Alzheimer’s disease with vector space models

Kathleen C. Fraser
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Graeme Hirst
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

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Published in: Proceedings of LREC 2016 Workshop. Resources and Processing of Linguistic and Extra-Linguistic Data from People with Various Forms of Cognitive/Psychiatric Impairments (RaPID-2016), Monday 23rd of May 2016

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 128:1, p. 1 to 8

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Published: 2016-06-03

ISBN: 978-91-7685-730-4

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

Numerous studies have shown that language impairments, particularly semantic deficits, are evident in the narrative speech of people with Alzheimer’s disease from the earliest stages of the disease. Here, we present a novel technique for capturing those changes, by comparing distributed word representations constructed from healthy controls and Alzheimer’s patients. We investigate examples of words with different representations in the two spaces, and link the semantic and contextual differences to findings from the Alzheimer’s disease literature.

Keywords

distributional semantics, Alzheimer’s disease, narrative speech

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