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
The study examines how speech preprocessing—such as enhancement, sample selection, and demographic balancing—affects Alzheimer’s disease detection models that use the Pitt Corpus. Experiments reveal that while speech‑enhanced datasets boost in‑domain accuracy, they diminish cross‑dataset robustness and introduce class imbalance and prediction shifts, even when training and testing enhancements are matched. Large audio‑language models show similar sensitivity, indicating that cleaner speech does not guarantee better real‑world performance.
By Luqi Sun, Shreeram Suresh Chandra, Lin Zhang, You-Jin Li, Brian MacWhinney, Yu Tsao, Emily Mower Provost, Berrak Sisman
Speech-based Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection increasingly relies on speech-enhanced and curated versions of the Pitt Corpus, where speech enhancement, sample selection, and demographic balancing ar...
arXiv:2602. 11177v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is challenging, particularly due to the limited availability of labeled data.
By Lei Jiang, Yue Zhou, Natalie Parde
arXiv:2606. 18571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities.
By William Nguyen, Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri
arXiv:2606. 30675v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early detection of dementia through speech analysis offers a non-invasive screening alternative, but capturing both acoustic and linguistic biomarkers remains challenging.
By Olivier Jiyoun Jung, Jonghyeon Park, Myungwoo Oh