Automatic detection of linguistic indicators as a means of early detection of Alzheimer's disease and of related dementias: A computational linguistics analysis

Abstract

In the present study, we analyzed written samples obtained from Greek native speakers diagnosed with Alzheimer's in mild and moderate stages and from age-matched cognitively normal controls (NC). We adopted a computational approach for the comparison of morpho-syntactic complexity and lexical variety in the samples. We used text classification approaches to assign the samples to one of the two groups. The classifiers were tested using various features: morpho-syntactic and lexical characteristics. The proposed method excels in discerning AD patients in mild and moderate stages from NC leading to the in-depth understanding of language deficits.