arXiv AI

Automatic estimation of verbal fluency index in people with Motor Neuron Disease using ASR alignment and pause modelling

The study introduces an automated system for estimating the Verbal Fluency Index (VFI) in individuals with Motor Neuron Disease (MND) by combining ASR (WhisperX) and VAD (Silero) with precise timestamping. Using a unique MND dataset, the approach outperformed traditional acoustic and self‑supervised embedding methods, achieving high predictive accuracy (R² up to 0.9 for P‑words and 0.8 for S‑words). Clinically inspired features were consistently superior, demonstrating the feasibility of automated VFI estimation for monitoring cognitive impairment in MND.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Beyond Decodability: Do Acoustic Factors Drive Predictions in Speech-Based Alzheimer's Assessment?

The study investigates whether acoustic factors encoded in pretrained self‑supervised learning (SSL) models can systematically influence predictions in speech‑based Alzheimer's disease (AD) assessment. Using the ADReSSo dataset and three large SSL backbones, the authors applied controlled noise and reverberation interventions to various audio segments and combined layer‑wise decoding, input‑ and representation‑space interventions, and geometric alignment analysis. The results demonstrate that such acoustic interventions alter AD predictions across all models, with noise producing the strongest effect, and that these effects are structured relative to the classifier’s decision direction and reproducible on a held‑out test set.

By Serli Kopar, Alkis Koudounas, Roshan P. Rane, Sam Gijsen, Paula A. Perez-Toro, Kerstin Ritter
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Cross-Lingual Parkinson's Disease Severity Assessment Using Pre-trained Speech Embeddings: A Multi-Class Evaluation

The paper evaluates pre‑trained speech embeddings from four state‑of‑the‑art speech foundation models for cross‑lingual Parkinson's disease severity assessment. Experiments span three datasets in zero‑shot and k‑shot settings, showing that these embeddings can transfer meaningfully across languages, though performance varies with dataset characteristics, preprocessing, and adaptation strategy. Misclassifications linked to inter‑speaker variability and atypical speech patterns underscore the need for more robust feature extraction, modeling, and explainability to support reliable clinical insights.

By Simon Pals, Cristian Tejedor-Garcia
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

BenSParX: A Robust Explainable Machine Learning Framework for Parkinson's Disease Detection from Bengali Conversational Speech

BenSparX introduces the first Bengali conversational speech dataset for Parkinson’s disease detection and pairs it with a robust, explainable machine learning framework. The framework uses diverse acoustic features, systematic feature selection, and advanced classifiers, achieving 95.67% accuracy, 95.62% F1, and 0.990 AUC. SHAP analysis is employed to explain feature contributions, and the model outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on other language datasets.

By Riad Hossain, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Arat Ibne Golam Mowla, Animesh Chandra Roy, Ranjit Kumar Ghosh
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Why Alzheimer's Speech Screening Fails to Generalize: Bridging the Deployment Gap via Cross-Corpus Evidence Anchoring

The paper examines why speech‑based screening for Alzheimer’s disease fails to generalize across different languages, tasks, and recording protocols. Using a leave‑one‑corpus‑out evaluation on four datasets, it finds that 59 of 70 interpretable speech features show conflicting patterns between healthy controls and cognitive risk groups, with pause, silence, and speech rate being highly protocol‑sensitive. The authors propose a fusion method that combines XLM‑R text baseline scores with evidence anchors, improving mean speaker AUC to 0.785 and worst‑case AUC to 0.615, and emphasize the importance of auditing feature transferability and reporting worst‑case domain robustness.

By Zijian Lu, Sizhe Liu, Yin Zhang, Jixuan Deng, Xinrong Lin, Xinchen Yuan, Chicheng Jin, Yiping Zuo, Yuanchao Li