Alzheimer’s Dementia Recognition From Spontaneous Speech Using Disfluency and Interactional Features

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder mainly characterized by memory loss with deficits in other cognitive domains, including language, visuospatial abilities, and changes in behavior. Detecting diagnostic biomarkers that are noninvasive and cost-effective is of great value not only for clinical assessments and diagnostics but also for research purposes. Several previous studies have investigated AD diagnosis via the acoustic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects of speech and language. Other studies include approaches from conversation analysis that look at more interactional aspects, showing that disfluencies such as fillers and repairs, and purely nonverbal features such as inter-speaker silence, can be key features of AD conversations. These kinds of features, if useful for diagnosis, may have many advantages: They are simple to extract and relatively language-, topic-, and task-independent. This study aims to quantify the role and contribution of these features of interaction structure in predicting whether a dialogue participant has AD. We used a subset of the Carolinas Conversation Collection dataset of patients with AD at moderate stage within the age range 60–89 and similar-aged non-AD patients with other health conditions. Our feature analysis comprised two sets: disfluency features, including indicators such as self-repairs and fillers, and interactional features, including overlaps, turn-taking behavior, and distributions of different types of silence both within patient speech and between patient and interviewer speech. Statistical analysis showed significant differences between AD and non-AD groups for several disfluency features (edit terms, verbatim repeats, and substitutions) and interactional features (lapses, gaps, attributable silences, turn switches per minute, standardized phonation time, and turn length). For the classification of AD patient conversations vs. non-AD patient conversations, we achieved 83% accuracy with disfluency features, 83% accuracy with interactional features, and an overall accuracy of 90% when combining both feature sets using support vector machine classifiers. The discriminative power of these features, perhaps combined with more conventional linguistic features, therefore shows potential for integration into noninvasive clinical assessments for AD at advanced stages

Testing the roles of disfluency and rate of speech in the coordination of conversation

This thesis is concerned with two different accounts of how speakers coordinate conversation. In both accounts it is suggested that aspects of the manner in which speech is performed (its disfluency and its rate) are integral to the smooth performance of conversation. In the first strand, we address Clark's (1996) suggestion that speakers design hesitations, such as filled pauses (e.g. uh and um), repetitions and prolongations, to signal to their audience that they are experiencing difficulties during language production. Such signals allow speakers to account for their use of time, particularly when they experience disruptions during production. The account is tested against three criteria, proposed by Kraljic and Brennan (2005), for evaluating whether a feature of speech is being designed: That it be produced with regularity, that it be interpretable by listeners, and that its production varies according to the speaker's communicative intention. While existing literature offers support for the first two criteria, neither an experiment with dyads nor analyses of dialogue in the Map Task Corpus (MTC; Anderson et al., 1991) found support for the third criterion. We conclude that, rather than being signals of difficulty, hesitations are merely symptoms which listeners may exploit to aid comprehension. In the second strand, we tested Wilson and Wilson's (2005) oscillator theory of the timing of turn-taking. This suggests that entrainment between conversational partners' rates of speech allow them to make precise predictions about when each others' turns are going to end, and, subsequently, when they can begin a turn of their own. As a critical test of the theory, we predicted that speakers who were more tightly entrained would produce more seamless turn-taking. Again using the MTC, we found no evidence of a relationship between how closely entrained speakers were and how precisely they timed the beginning of their turns relative to the ends of each others' turns.sub_shsunpub1631_ethesesunpu

Dialogue without barriers. A comprehensive approach to dealing with stuttering

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Dialogue without barriers. A comprehensive approach to dealing with stuttering

The book Dialogue without barriers: A comprehensive approach to dealing with stuttering is the result of Norwegian-Polish cooperation undertaken in the project LOGOLab – Dialogue without barriers. Three partners have been involved in the production of this book, namely, the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, the UiT Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, and the Agere Aude Foundation for Knowledge and Social Dialogue. The project was implemented under the Education Program financed by the EEA Grants (EEA / 19 / K1 / D1 / W / 0031). The EEA Grants represent the contribution of Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway towards a green, competitive, and inclusive Europe. The most important goal of the LOGOLab project was to raise the standards of speech-language therapy in stuttering by incorporating the principles of Evidence-based practice, taking into account the assumptions of inclusive education and community-based model of intervention. An essential strategy for achieving this goal has become the dissemination of reliable and up-to-date knowledge about stuttering, and the development of appropriate social attitudes towards stuttering. The improvement of the quality of academic education for speech-language therapy students and of vocational training for certified speech-language therapists should also be mentioned. An additional aim was to provide reliable information for leaders of the self-help movement, who support people with stuttering non-institutionally

Specific Language Impairments and Possibilities of Classification and Detection from Children's Speech

Many young children have speech disorders. My research focused on one such disorder, known as specific language impairment or developmental dysphasia. A major problem in treating this disorder is the fact that specific language impairment is detected in children at a relatively late age. For successful speech therapy, early diagnosis is critical. I present two different approaches to this issue using a very simple test that I have devised for diagnosing this disorder. In this thesis, I describe a new method for detecting specific language impairment based on the number of pronunciation errors in utterances. An advantage of this method is its simplicity; anyone can use it, including parents. The second method is based on the acoustic features of the speech signal. An advantage of this method is that it could be used to develop an automatic detection system. KeyKatedra teorie obvod

Robotic Collective Memory

The various ways in which robots and AI will affect our future society are at the center of scholarly attention. This Commentary, conversely, concentrates on their possible impact on humanity’s past, or more accurately, on the ways societies will remember their joint past. We focus on the emerging use of technologies that combine AI, cutting-edge visualization techniques, and social robots, in order to store and communicate recollections of the past in an interactive human-like manner. We explore the use of these technologies by remembrance institutions and their potential impact on collective memory. Taking a close look at the case study of NDT (New Dimensions in Testimony)—a project that uses ‘virtual witnesses’ to convey memories from the Holocaust and other mass atrocities—we highlight the significant value, and the potential vulnerabilities, of this new mode of memory construction. Against this background, we propose a novel concept of memory fiduciaries that can form the basis for a policy framework for robotic collective memory. Drawing on Jack Balkin’s concept of ‘information fiduciaries’ on the one hand, and on studies of collective memory on the other, we explain the nature of and the justifications for memory fiduciaries. We then demonstrate, in broad strokes, the potential implications of this new conceptualization for various questions pertaining to collective memory constructed by AI and robots. By so doing, this Commentary aims to start a conversation on the policies that would allow algorithmic collective memory to fulfill its potential, while minimizing its social costs. On a more general level, it brings to the fore a series of important policy questions pertaining to the intersection of new technologies and intergenerational collective memory

Interviewer speech and the success of survey invitations

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94771/1/rssa1064.pd

Interaction in dialogue: the effects of partner feedback on speakers, addressees and overhearers

The primary aim of this thesis is to analyse how interaction with a conversational partner affects the performance of speakers, their addressees, and those who overhear the discourse. Speakers frequently appear to adjust their speech to accommodate their addressees' needs (although the extent to which this is deliberate is a topic of much debate), and this often seems to occur as a direct response to the feedback they receive from their partners. The bulk of the research in this area has focussed upon the manner in which speakers use feedback to facilitate the overall success of the interaction (in terms of completing the task at hand, for example), but fewer studies have investigated how feedback specifically affects detailed characteristics of the speakers' speech. This thesis attempts to investigate such a topic, whilst also examining the benefit to addressees of being able to give feedback, and the benefit to overhearers of hearing addressees' feedback.The thesis begins by examining the effect of feedback on speakers' and addressees' performances. It first reports a referential communication task which investigated some of the notable differences between speakers' speech in monologue and dialogue contexts (Experiment 1). I focussed in particular on how detailed aspects of language production, such as the length of object descriptions and the repetitiveness of the language used, varied between these two feedback conditions. I also looked at how the ability to give feedback aided the addressees' performances on the given task. Experiment 2 then analysed how the amount of feedback received by the speaker related to, firstly, the shortening of their item descriptions over repetitions, and secondly, the increasing consistency of descriptions (in terms of lexical overlap) during the experiment.The second section of the thesis focuses primarily on the benefit for overhearers of hearing other people's feedback. It first reports two experiments that replicated and expanded on a study by Fox Tree (1999) which showed that overhearers identified tangrams more accurately when they overheard a dialogue rather than a monologue. Experiments 3 and 4 tested two explanations proposed by Fox Tree for this result; firstly, the potential presence of additional perspectives in dialogue (for example, one partner viewing a tangram as a 'chicken', and the other calling it an 'ice skater'), and secondly the more numerous discourse markers in dialogue in comparison with monologue. Additionally, the use of repeated descriptions by the speakers allowed me to analyse the effect of interlocutors' 'conceptual pacts' on overhearers' task performance. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 assessed how the benefit of, firstly, giving feedback (for addressees) and secondly, hearing feedback (for overhearers) was affected by the difficulty of the task at hand. Overall, this thesis provides evidence that whether people are producing, receiving or simply overhearing feedback, it influences their performance in a positive manner, meaning that, in general, a greater amount of interaction leads to more successful communication for everyone involved

Creating pre-Evaluation opportunity spaces in IRE sequences: Evidence from Italian L2 classrooms in a University Context.

This thesis explores L2 classroom teacher-fronted activities organised in Initiation-Response- Evaluation (IRE) sequences, during beginner and intermediate lessons of Italian at the University level. More specifically, the study analyses the ways in which teachers address a variety of pedagogical contingencies while simultaneously progressing the interaction. It is argued that the tripartite sequential structure provides the teachers with pre-evaluative moments - here defined as pre-Evaluation opportunity spaces - emerging between the student’s responsive move (R) and the teacher’s third positioned evaluation (E). The research draws upon 30 hours of video- and audio-recorded interactions from two University Italian L2 classrooms. The study is informed by multimodal Conversation Analysis and socio-interactional approaches to language learning. Classroom interaction is, thus, regarded as one institutional type of social interaction and - as such - is viewed as jointly achieved by participants, sequentially organised, and relentlessly negotiated on a moment-by-moment basis. The findings show that the teachers regularly exploit specific IRE sequential affordances, such as the inter-move space between the student’s responsive move and the teacher’s evaluation. In particular, the fine-grained analysis of the teachers’ multimodal conduct uncovers how such opportunity space arising between Response and Evaluation may be employed in order to invite peer-correction practices, manage shifting classroom participation frameworks, distribute agency in the L2 classroom, and orient to the omnirelevant property of sequential progressivity while attending to concurrent institutional pressures. Furthermore, the analysis unearths how such intra-move space might be organised through the mobilisation of different semiotic material, such as head nods, pointing gestures, gaze, and body orientation. The findings confirm the adaptive quality of the IRE sequence organisation as one fundamental infrastructure that embodies the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and interaction