Alzheimer’s disease recognition from spontaneous speech using large language models

Abstract

We propose a method to automatically predict Alzheimer’s disease from speech data using the ChatGPT large language model. Alzheimer’s disease patients often exhibit distinctive characteristics when describing images, such as difficulties in recalling words, grammar errors, repetitive language, and incoherent narratives. For prediction, we initially employ a speech recognition system to transcribe participants’ speech into text. We then gather opinions by inputting the transcribed text into ChatGPT as well as a prompt designed to solicit fluency evaluations. Subsequently, we extract embeddings from the speech, text, and opinions by the pretrained models. Finally, we use a classifier consisting of transformer blocks and linear layers to identify participants with this type of dementia. Experiments are conducted using the extensively used ADReSSo dataset. The results yield a maximum accuracy of 87.3% when speech, text, and opinions are used in conjunction. This finding suggests the potential of leveraging evaluation feedback from language models to address challenges in Alzheimer’s disease recognition.

Keywords

• alzheimer’s disease
• dementia
• dementia detection
• large language model
• pretrained model