NLP-oriented contrastive study of linguistic productions of alzheimer’s and control people

Abstract

The increase in Alzheimers disease is due to the aging of the population and is the first cause of neurodegenerative disorders. Progressive development of cognitive, emotional and behavior troubles leads to the loss of autonomy and to dependency of people, which corresponds to the dementia phase. Language disorders are among the first clinical cognitive signs of the disease. Our objective is to study verbal communication of people affected by the Alzheimer’s disease at early to moderate stages. One particularity of our approach is that we work in ecological conversation situation: people are faced to persons they know. We study verbal productions of five people affected by the Alzheimer’s disease and of five control people. The conversations are transcribed and processed with the NLP methods and tools. Over thirty features grouped in four categories are studied. Our results indicate that the Alzheimer’s patients present lexical and semantic deficit and that, in several ways, their conversation is notably poorer than the conversation of the control people.