Background Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that results in altered behavior, social development, and communication patterns. In recent years, autism prevalence has tripled, with 1 in 44 children now affected. Given that traditional diagnosis is a lengthy, labor-intensive process that requires the work of trained physicians, significant attention has been given to developing systems that automatically detect autism. We work toward this goal by analyzing audio data, as prosody abnormalities are a signal of autism, with affected children displaying speech idiosyncrasies such as echolalia, monotonous intonation, atypical pitch, and irregular linguistic stress patterns. Objective We aimed to test the ability for machine learning approaches to aid in detection of autism in self-recorded speech audio captured from children with ASD and neurotypical (NT) children in their home environments. Methods We considered three methods to detect autism in child speech: (1) random forests trained on extracted audio features (including Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients); (2) convolutional neural networks trained on spectrograms; and (3) fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0—a state-of-the-art transformer-based speech recognition model. We trained our classifiers on our novel data set of cellphone-recorded child speech audio curated from the Guess What? mobile game, an app designed to crowdsource videos of children with ASD and NT children in a natural home environment. Results The random forest classifier achieved 70% accuracy, the fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model achieved 77% accuracy, and the convolutional neural network achieved 79% accuracy when classifying children’s audio as either ASD or NT. We used 5-fold cross-validation to evaluate model performance. Conclusions Our models were able to predict autism status when trained on a varied selection of home audio clips with inconsistent recording qualities, which may be more representative of real-world conditions. The results demonstrate that machine learning methods offer promise in detecting autism automatically from speech without specialized equipment.

An understanding of patronizing and condescending language detection is an important part of identifying and addressing discrimination and prejudice in various forms of communication. In this paper, we investigate several methods for detecting patronizing and condescending language in short statements as part of SemEval-2022 Task 4. For Task 1a, we investigate applying both lightweight (tree-based and linear) machine learning classification models and fine-tuned pre-trained large language models. Our final system achieves an F1-score of 0.4321, recall-score of 0.5016, and a precisionscore of 0.3795 (ranked 53 / 78) on Task 1a.

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which results in altered behavior, social development, and communication patterns. In past years, autism prevalence has tripled, with 1 in 54 children now affected. Given that traditional diagnosis is a lengthy, labor-intensive process which requires the work of trained physicians, significant attention has been given to developing systems that automatically diagnose and screen for autism. OBJECTIVE Prosody abnormalities are among the most clear signs of autism, with affected children displaying speech idiosyncrasies (including echolalia, monotonous intonation, atypical pitch, and irregular linguistic stress patterns). In this work, we present a suite of machine learning approaches to detect autism in self-recorded speech audio captured from autistic and neurotypical (NT) children in home environments. METHODS We consider three methods to detect autism in child speech: first, Random Forests trained on extracted audio features (including Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients); second, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on spectrograms; and third, fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0—a state-of-the-art Transformer-based speech recognition model. We train our classifiers on our novel dataset of cellphone-recorded child speech audio curated from Stanford’s Guess What? mobile game, an app designed to crowdsource videos of autistic and neurotypical children in a natural home environment. RESULTS The Random Forest classifier achieves 70% accuracy, the fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model achieves 77% accuracy, and the CNN achieves 79% accuracy when classifying children’s audio as either ASD or NT. We use five-fold cross-validation to evaluate model performance. CONCLUSIONS Our models were able to predict autism status when training on a varied selection of home audio clips with inconsistent recording qualities, which may be more generalizable to real world conditions. The results demonstrate that machine learning methods offer promise in detecting autism automatically from speech without specialized equipment.

Robust sarcasm detection is critical for creating artificial systems that can effectively perform sentiment analysis in written text. In this work, we investigate AI approaches to identifying whether a text is sarcastic or not as part of SemEval-2022 Task 6. We focus on creating systems for Task A, where we experiment with lightweight statistical classification approaches trained on both GloVe features and manuallyselected features. Additionally, we investigate fine-tuning the transformer model BERT. Our final system for Task A is an Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGB Classifier) trained on manually-engineered features. Our final system achieved an F1-score of 0.2403 on Subtask A and was ranked 32 of 43.