Detecting Alzheimer's disease by exploiting linguistic information from Nepali transcript

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of neurodegenerating disorder accounting for 60–80% of all dementia cases. The lack of effective clinical treatment options to completely cure or even slow the progression of disease makes it even more serious. Treatment options are available to treat the milder stage of the disease to provide symptomatic short-term relief and improve quality of life. Early diagnosis is key in the treatment and management of AD as advanced stages of disease cause severe cognitive decline and permanent brain damage. This has prompted researchers to explore innovative ways to detect AD early on. Changes in speech are one of the main signs of AD patients. As the brain deteriorates the language processing ability of the patients deteriorates too. Previous research has been done in the English language using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for early detection of AD. However, research using local languages and low resourced language like Nepali still lag behind. NLP is an important tool in Artificial Intelligence to decipher the human language and perform various tasks. In this paper, various classifiers have been discussed for the early detection of Alzheimer’s in the Nepali language. The proposed study makes a convincing conclusion that the difficulty in processing information in AD patients reflects in their speech while describing a picture. The study incorporates the speech decline of AD patients to classify them as control subjects or AD patients using various classifiers and NLP techniques. Furthermore, in this experiment a new dataset consisting of transcripts of AD patients and Control normal (CN) subjects in the Nepali language. In addition, this paper sets a baseline for the early detection of AD using NLP in the Nepali language.