# Linguistic Changes in Spontaneous Speech for Detecting Parkinsons Disease Using Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05160 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05160/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [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)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10005/) (2022)
- [Detecting cognitive decline using speech only: The ADReSSo Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09356/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parkinsons disease is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder with over ten million active cases worldwide and one million new diagnoses per year. Detecting and subsequently diagnosing the disease is challenging because of symptom heterogeneity with respect to complexity, as well as the type and timing of phenotypic manifestations. Typically, language impairment can present in the prodromal phase and precede motor symptoms suggesting that a linguistic-based approach could serve as a diagnostic method for incipient Parkinsons disease. Additionally, improved linguistic models may enhance other approaches through ensemble techniques. The field of large language models is advancing rapidly, presenting the opportunity to explore the use of these new models for detecting Parkinsons disease and to improve on current linguistic approaches with high-dimensional representations of linguistics. We evaluate the application of state-of-the-art large language models to detect Parkinsons disease automatically from spontaneous speech with up to 73% accuracy.