# Data Augmentation for Dementia Detection in Spoken Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12879 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12879/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [AST: Audio Spectrogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01778/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Data Augmentation Approaches for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03075/) (2021)
- [Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06201/) (2018)
- [AUTOVC: Zero-Shot Voice Style Transfer with Only Autoencoder Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05879/) (2019)
- [Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech: The ADReSS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06833/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Limited Data Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07499/) (2021)
- [Detecting cognitive decline using speech only: The ADReSSo Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09356/) (2021)
- [To BERT or Not To BERT: Comparing Speech and Language-based Approaches for Alzheimer's Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01551/) (2020)
- [FragmentVC: Any-to-Any Voice Conversion by End-to-End Extracting and Fusing Fine-Grained Voice Fragments With Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14150/) (2020)
- [Deep ensemble learning for Alzheimers disease classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12827/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Advancing Stuttering Detection via Data Augmentation, Class-Balanced Loss and Multi-Contextual Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11343/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Picture Description Speech for Dementia Detection using Image-text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07933/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Review of NLP for Dementia -- Tasks, Datasets and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19737/) (2024)
- [Audio-based Kinship Verification Using Age Domain Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11120/) (2024)
- [Deep Insights into Cognitive Decline: A Survey of Leveraging Non-Intrusive Modalities with Deep Learning Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18972/) (2024)
- [ClaritySpeech: Dementia Obfuscation in Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09282/) (2025)
- [Can Large Language Models Imitate Human Speech for Clinical Assessment? LLM-Driven Data Augmentation for Cognitive Score Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16077/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dementia is a growing problem as our society ages, and detection methods are often invasive and expensive. Recent deep-learning techniques can offer a faster diagnosis and have shown promising results. However, they require large amounts of labelled data which is not easily available for the task of dementia detection. One effective solution to sparse data problems is data augmentation, though the exact methods need to be selected carefully. To date, there has been no empirical study of data augmentation on Alzheimer's disease (AD) datasets for NLP and speech processing. In this work, we investigate data augmentation techniques for the task of AD detection and perform an empirical evaluation of the different approaches on two kinds of models for both the text and audio domains. We use a transformer-based model for both domains, and SVM and Random Forest models for the text and audio domains, respectively. We generate additional samples using traditional as well as deep learning based methods and show that data augmentation improves performance for both the text- and audio-based models and that such results are comparable to state-of-the-art results on the popular ADReSS set, with carefully crafted architectures and features.