# Conformer Based Elderly Speech Recognition System for Alzheimer's Disease Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00015/) (2018)
- [Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00420/) (2019)
- [SNAS: Stochastic Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09926/) (2018)
- [Recent Developments on ESPnet Toolkit Boosted by Conformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13956/) (2020)
- [Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech: The ADReSS Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06833/) (2020)
- [Detecting cognitive decline using speech only: The ADReSSo Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09356/) (2021)
- [Two-Pass End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10992/) (2019)
- [Learning Hidden Unit Contributions for Unsupervised Acoustic Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.02828/) (2016)
- [Investigation of Data Augmentation Techniques for Disordered Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05562/) (2022)
- [Comparing Acoustic-based Approaches for Alzheimer's Disease Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01555/) (2021)
- [Comparing Natural Language Processing Techniques for Alzheimer's Dementia Prediction in Spontaneous Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07358/) (2020)
- [Spectro-Temporal Deep Features for Disordered Speech Assessment and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05554/) (2022)
- [Neural Architecture Search For LF-MMI Trained Time Delay Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03943/) (2022)
- [Bayesian Learning for Deep Neural Network Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07460/) (2020)
- [Integrating Source-channel and Attention-based Sequence-to-sequence Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06614/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Transformers in Speech Processing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11607/) (2023)
- [Exploring Self-supervised Pre-trained ASR Models For Dysarthric and Elderly Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14564/) (2023)
- [Exploring linguistic feature and model combination for speech recognition based automatic AD detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13758/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised ASR Models and Features For Dysarthric and Elderly Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13782/) (2024)
- [Exploiting prompt learning with pre-trained language models for Alzheimer's Disease detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16539/) (2022)
- [A New Benchmark of Aphasia Speech Recognition and Detection Based on E-Branchformer and Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13331/) (2023)
- [Hyper-parameter Adaptation of Conformer ASR Systems for Elderly and Dysarthric Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15265/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Picture Description Speech for Dementia Detection using Image-text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07933/) (2023)
- [WhisperD: Dementia Speech Recognition and Filler Word Detection with Whisper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21551/) (2025)
- [Dementia Assessment Using Mandarin Speech with an Attention-based Speech Recognition Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03985/) (2023)
- [Regularized Federated Learning for Privacy-Preserving Dysarthric and Elderly Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11069/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Laryngoscopic Video Analysis for Assisted Diagnosis of Vocal Fold Paralysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03597/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is crucial in facilitating preventive care to delay further progression. This paper presents the development of a state-of-the-art Conformer based speech recognition system built on the DementiaBank Pitt corpus for automatic AD detection. The baseline Conformer system trained with speed perturbation and SpecAugment based data augmentation is significantly improved by incorporating a set of purposefully designed modeling features, including neural architecture search based auto-configuration of domain-specific Conformer hyper-parameters in addition to parameter fine-tuning; fine-grained elderly speaker adaptation using learning hidden unit contributions (LHUC); and two-pass cross-system rescoring based combination with hybrid TDNN systems. An overall word error rate (WER) reduction of 13.6% absolute (34.8% relative) was obtained on the evaluation data of 48 elderly speakers. Using the final systems' recognition outputs to extract textual features, the best-published speech recognition based AD detection accuracy of 91.7% was obtained.