WavBERT: Exploiting Semantic and Non-semantic Speech using Wav2vec and BERT for Dementia Detection
(3 minutes introduction)
| Youxiang Zhu (UMass Boston, USA), Abdelrahman Obyat (UMass Boston, USA), Xiaohui Liang (UMass Boston, USA), John A. Batsis (University of North Carolina, USA), Robert M. Roth (Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA) |
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In this paper, we exploit semantic and non-semantic information from patient’s speech data using Wav2vec and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for dementia detection. We first propose a basic WavBERT model by extracting semantic information from speech data using Wav2vec, and analyzing the semantic information using BERT for dementia detection. While the basic model discards the non-semantic information, we propose extended WavBERT models that convert the output of Wav2vec to the input to BERT for preserving the non-semantic information in dementia detection. Specifically, we determine the locations and lengths of inter-word pauses using the number of blank tokens from Wav2vec where the threshold for setting the pauses is automatically generated via BERT. We further design a pre-trained embedding conversion network that converts the output embedding of Wav2vec to the input embedding of BERT, enabling the fine-tuning of WavBERT with non-semantic information. Our evaluation results using the ADReSSo dataset showed that the WavBERT models achieved the highest accuracy of 83.1% in the classification task, the lowest Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) score of 4.44 in the regression task, and a mean F1 of 70.91% in the progression task. We confirmed the effectiveness of WavBERT models exploiting both semantic and non-semantic speech.
