# Automated speech- and text-based classification of neuropsychiatric conditions in a multidiagnostic setting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06916/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13979/) (2020)
- [The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04621/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Depression Recognition with Audiovisual Cues: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00610/) (2021)
- [SpliceOut: A Simple and Efficient Audio Augmentation Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00046/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech patterns have been identified as potential diagnostic markers for neuropsychiatric conditions. However, most studies only compare a single clinical group to healthy controls, whereas clinical practice often requires differentiating between multiple potential diagnoses (multiclass settings). To address this, we assembled a dataset of repeated recordings from 420 participants (67 with major depressive disorder, 106 with schizophrenia and 46 with autism, as well as matched controls), and tested the performance of a range of conventional machine learning models and advanced Transformer models on both binary and multiclass classification, based on voice and text features. While binary models performed comparably to previous research (F1 scores between 0.54-0.75 for autism spectrum disorder, ASD; 0.67-0.92 for major depressive disorder, MDD; and 0.71-0.83 for schizophrenia); when differentiating between multiple diagnostic groups performance decreased markedly (F1 scores between 0.35-0.44 for ASD, 0.57-0.75 for MDD, 0.15-0.66 for schizophrenia, and 0.38-0.52 macro F1). Combining voice and text-based models yielded increased performance, suggesting that they capture complementary diagnostic information. Our results indicate that models trained on binary classification may learn to rely on markers of generic differences between clinical and non-clinical populations, or markers of clinical features that overlap across conditions, rather than identifying markers specific to individual conditions. We provide recommendations for future research in the field, suggesting increased focus on developing larger transdiagnostic datasets that include more fine-grained clinical features, and that can support the development of models that better capture the complexity of neuropsychiatric conditions and naturalistic diagnostic assessment.