Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder involving speech and language deficits. Often, these are separately studied as proxies of motor and non-motor (e.g., cognitive) symptoms, respectively. Conversely, links between both dimensions remain virtually uncharted. This paper introduces a methodology that enables the synchronous study of acoustic and linguistic patterns in Parkinson's speech. Our findings show that verbs and nouns provided relevant acoustic and linguistic information not only to model motor impairments but also to understand non-motor symptoms like those that appear when Parkinson's disease patients develop mild cognitive impairment.

Pre-trained models generate speech representations that are used in different tasks, including the automatic detection of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Although these models can yield high accuracy, their interpretation is still challenging. This paper used a pre-trained Wav2vec 2.0 model to represent speech frames of 25ms length and perform a frame-by-frame discrimination between PD patients and healthy control (HC) subjects. This fine granularity prediction enabled us to identify specific linguistic segments with high discrimination capability. Speech representations of all produced verbs were compared w.r.t. nouns and the first ones yielded higher accuracies. To gaina deeper understanding of this pattern, representations of motor and non-motor verbs were compared and the first ones yielded better results, with accuracies of around 83% in an independent test set. These findings support well-established neurocognitive models about action-related language highlighted as key drivers of PD. Index Terms: computational paralinguistics, interpretability of pre-trained models, action verbs, Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological disorder impacting a person's speech. Among automatic PD assessment methods, deep learning models have gained particular interest. Recently, the community has explored cross-pathology and cross-language models which can improve diagnostic accuracy even further. However, strict patient data privacy regulations largely prevent institutions from sharing patient speech data with each other. In this paper, we employ federated learning (FL) for PD detection using speech signals from 3 real-world language corpora of German, Spanish, and Czech, each from a separate institution. Our results indicate that the FL model outperforms all the local models in terms of diagnostic accuracy, while not performing very differently from the model based on centrally combined training sets, with the advantage of not requiring any data sharing among collaborators. This will simplify inter-institutional collaborations, resulting in enhancement of patient outcomes.

Hypokinetic and hyperkinetic dysarthria are motor speech disorders that appear in patients with Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, respectively. They are caused due to progressive lesions or alterations in the basal ganglia. In particular, Huntington's disease (HD) is known to be more invasive and difficult to treat than Parkinson's disease (PD), producing more aggressive motor and cognitive alterations. Since speech production requires the movement and control of many different muscles and limbs, it constitutes a highly complex motor activity that may reflect relevant aspects of the patient's health state. This paper proposes the discrimination between patients with PD, HD, and healthy controls (HC) based on different speech dimensions. Speaker models based on Gaussian-mixture model supervectors are created with the features extracted from each speech dimension. The results suggest that it is possible to distinguish between PD and HD patients using the supervectors-based approach.

Dialect recognition is useful in many industrial sectors, par-ticularly with the aim of allowing a better interaction between customers and providers. The core idea is to improve or customize marketing and customer service strategies, de-pending on the geographic location, birthplace and culture. This study proposes different models to automatically dis-criminate between two Colombian dialects: “Antioqueño” and “Bogotano”, to the best of our knowledge this is the first work of Colombian dialect recognition based on real conver-sations from customer service centers. The proposed strategy consists of independent analyses, using information from speech recordings and their corresponding transliterations. On the one hand, classical approaches are used to model speech including prosody features, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients and the mean Hilbert envelope coefficients. For text models, Word2Vec and bidirectional encoding represen-tations from transformer embeddings are considered. On the other hand, a deep learning approach is applied by considering convolutional neural networks, which are trained using spectrograms and embedding matrices for speech and text, respectively. The implemented deep learning models seem to be more promising than the classical ones for the addressed problem. Further experiments will be considered to validate this claim in a wider spectrum of methods.