Towards Domain-Agnostic and Domain-Adaptive Dementia Detection from Spoken Language

Shahla Farzana, Natalie Parde

Main: NLP Applications Main-oral Paper

Session 1: NLP Applications (Oral)
Conference Room: Metropolitan East
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Keywords: healthcare applications, clincial nlp
TLDR: Health-related speech datasets are often small and varied in focus. This makes it difficult to leverage them to effectively support healthcare goals. Robust transfer of linguistic features across different datasets orbiting the same goal carries potential to address this concern. To test this hypot...
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Abstract: Health-related speech datasets are often small and varied in focus. This makes it difficult to leverage them to effectively support healthcare goals. Robust transfer of linguistic features across different datasets orbiting the same goal carries potential to address this concern. To test this hypothesis, we experiment with domain adaptation (DA) techniques on heterogeneous spoken language data to evaluate generalizability across diverse datasets for a common task: dementia detection. We find that adapted models exhibit better performance across conversational and task-oriented datasets. The feature-augmented DA method achieves a 22\% increase in accuracy adapting from a conversational to task-specific dataset compared to a jointly trained baseline. This suggests promising capacity of these techniques to allow for productive use of disparate data for a complex spoken language healthcare task.