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Identifying Easy Indicators Of Dementia, Swati Padhee, Tanvi Banerjee, Valerie L. Shalin, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

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Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a degenerative chronic neurodegenerative disease that affects millions of people and whose care costs billions of dollars. There is growing evidence that variations in speech and language may be early indicators of dementia. One of the most initial symptoms of dementia is speech impairment, including difficulty in finding words and changes to the grammatical structure. These early indicators can be detected by having the patients perform a picture description task, such as the Cookie Theft task from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. However, much of the state-of-the-art NLP for dementia has been limited due to the …