Analysis of Hierarchical Multi-Content Text Classification Model on B-SHARP Dataset for Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

AbstractThis paper presents a new dataset, B-SHARP, that can be used to develop NLP models for the detection of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) known as an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Our dataset contains 1-2 min speech segments from 326 human subjects for 3 topics, (1) daily activity, (2) room environment, and (3) picture description, and their transcripts so that a total of 650 speech segments are collected. Given the B-SHARP dataset, several hierarchical text classification models are developed that jointly learn combinatory features across all 3 topics. The best performance of 74.1% is achieved by an ensemble model that adapts 3 types of transformer encoders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that builds deep learning-based text classification models on multiple contents for the detection of MCI.