Natural language processing tools are used to automatically detect disturbances in transcribed speech of schizophrenia inpatients who speak Hebrew. We measure topic mutation over time and show that controls maintain more cohesive speech than inpatients. We also examine differences in how inpatients and controls use adjectives and adverbs to describe content words and show that the ones used by controls are more common than the those of inpatients. We provide experimental results and show their potential for automatically detecting schizophrenia in patients by means only of their speech patterns.
@article{arxiv.1904.07953,
title = {Semantic Characteristics of Schizophrenic Speech},
author = {Kfir Bar and Vered Zilberstein and Ido Ziv and Heli Baram and Nachum Dershowitz and Samuel Itzikowitz and Eiran Vadim Harel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.07953},
year = {2019}
}