In today's aging society, the number of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) increases. Reliable tools for automatic early screening as well as monitoring of AD patients are necessary. For that, semantic deficits have been shown to be useful indicators. We present a way to significantly improve the method introduced by Wankerl et al. [1]. The purely statistical approach of n-gram language models (LMs) is enhanced by using the rwthlm toolkit to create neural network language models (NNLMs) with Long Short Term-Memory (LSTM) cells. The prediction is solely based on evaluating the perplexity of transliterations of descriptions of the Cookie Theft picture from DementiaBank's Pitt Corpus. Each transliteration is evaluated on LMs of both control and Alzheimer speakers in a leave-one-speaker-out cross-validation scheme. The resulting perplexity values reveal enough discrepancy to classify patients on just those two values with an accuracy of 85.6% at equalerror-rate.

In the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the need for remote digital health assessment tools is greater than ever. This statement is especially pertinent for elderly and vulnerable populations. In this regard, the INTERSPEECH 2020 Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech (ADReSS) Challenge offers competitors the opportunity to develop speech and language-based systems for the task of Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) recognition. The challenge data consists of speech recordings and their transcripts, the work presented herein is an assessment of different contemporary approaches on these modalities. Specifically, we compared a hierarchical neural network with an attention mechanism trained on linguistic features with three acoustic-based systems: (i) Bag-of-Audio-Words (BoAW) quantising different low-level descriptors, (ii) a Siamese Network trained on log-Mel spectrograms, and (iii) a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) end-to-end system trained on raw waveforms. Key results indicate the strength of the linguistic approach over the acoustics systems. Our strongest test-set result was achieved using a late fusion combination of BoAW, End-to-End CNN, and hierarchical-attention networks, which outperformed the challenge baseline in both the classification and regression tasks.

Speech-based degree of sleepiness estimation is an emerging research problem. In the literature, this problem has been mainly addressed through modeling of low level of descriptors. This paper investigates an end-to-end approach, where given raw waveform as input, a neural network estimates at its output the degree of sleepiness. Through an investigation on the continuous sleepiness subchallenge of the INTERSPEECH 2019 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge, we show that the proposed approach consistently yields performance comparable or better than low level descriptor-based, bag-of-audio-words-based and sequence-to-sequence autoencoder feature representation-based regression systems. Furthermore, a confusion matrix analysis on the development set shows that, unlike the best baseline system, the performance of our approach is not centering around a few degrees of sleepiness, but is spread across all the degrees of sleepiness.

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In the literature, the task of dysarthric speech intelligibility assessment has been approached through development of different low-level feature representations, subspace modeling, phone confidence estimation or measurement of automatic speech recognition system accuracy. This paper proposes a novel approach where the intelligibility is estimated as the percentage of correct words uttered by a speaker with dysarthria by matching and verifying utterances of the speaker with dysarthria against control speakers' utterances in phone posterior feature space and broad phonetic posterior feature space. Experimental validation of the proposed approach on the UA-Speech database, with posterior feature estimators trained on the data from auxiliary domain and language, obtained a best Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) of 0.950 and Spearman's correlation coefficient (ρ) of 0.957. Furthermore, replacing control speakers' speech with speech synthesized by a neural text-to-speech system obtained a best r of 0.937 and ρ of 0.961.

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