A Systematic Review of NLP for Dementia -- Tasks, Datasets and Opportunities
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
The close link between cognitive decline and language has fostered long-standing collaboration between the NLP and medical communities in dementia research. To examine this, we reviewed over 240 papers applying NLP to dementia-related efforts, drawing from medical, technological, and NLP-focused literature. We identify key research areas, including dementia detection, linguistic biomarker extraction, caregiver support, and patient assistance, showing that half of all papers focus solely on dementia detection using clinical data. Yet, many directions remain unexplored -- artificially degraded language models, synthetic data, digital twins, and more. We highlight gaps and opportunities around trust, scientific rigor, applicability and cross-community collaboration. We raise ethical dilemmas in the field, and highlight the diverse datasets encountered throughout our review -- recorded, written, structured, spontaneous, synthetic, clinical, social media-based, and more. This review aims to inspire more creative, impactful, and rigorous research on NLP for dementia.
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 216 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2024.
Builds on
33 of 216 references.
References · 33
- 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
- 2021Detecting cognitive decline using speech only: The ADReSSo Challengecited by 81
- 2021Medically Aware GPT-3 as a Data Generator for Medical Dialogue Summarizationcited by 76
- 2020To BERT or Not To BERT: Comparing Speech and Language-based Approaches for Alzheimer's Disease Detectioncited by 49
- 2017Boosting Deep Learning Risk Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks for Electronic Health Recordscited by 36
- 2020Artificial Intelligence, speech and language processing approaches to monitoring Alzheimer's Disease: a systematic reviewcited by 29
- 2021Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition Using Acoustic, Lexical, Disfluency and Speech Pause Features Robust to Noisy Inputscited by 27
- 2023Two Directions for Clinical Data Generation with Large Language Models: Data-to-Label and Label-to-Datacited by 26
- 2019Transfer Learning for Clinical Time Series Analysis using Deep Neural Networkscited by 22
- 2020Exploiting Multi-Modal Features From Pre-trained Networks for Alzheimer's Dementia Recognitioncited by 20
- 2018Detecting Linguistic Characteristics of Alzheimer's Dementia by Interpreting Neural Modelscited by 19
- 2021Explainable Identification of Dementia from Transcripts using Transformer Networkscited by 19
21 more
- 2020Multimodal Inductive Transfer Learning for Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia and its Severitycited by 16
- 2020The INESC-ID Multi-Modal System for the ADReSS 2020 Challengecited by 15
- 2020Comparing Natural Language Processing Techniques for Alzheimer's Dementia Prediction in Spontaneous Speechcited by 14
- 2021Alzheimer's Disease Detection from Spontaneous Speech through Combining Linguistic Complexity and (Dis)Fluency Features with Pretrained Language Modelscited by 13
- 2019A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorderscited by 11
- 2019Named Entity Recognition in Electronic Health Records Using Transfer Learning Bootstrapped Neural Networkscited by 10
- 2020A Tale of Two Perplexities: Sensitivity of Neural Language Models to Lexical Retrieval Deficits in Dementia of the Alzheimer's Typecited by 9
- 2022Exploring linguistic feature and model combination for speech recognition based automatic AD detectioncited by 9
- 2017Enriching Complex Networks with Word Embeddings for Detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment from Speech Transcriptscited by 7
- 2022Data Augmentation for Dementia Detection in Spoken Languagecited by 7
- 2019Enriching Neural Models with Targeted Features for Dementia Detectioncited by 5
- 2021Robustness and Sensitivity of BERT Models Predicting Alzheimer's Disease from Textcited by 5
- 2023Alzheimer Disease Classification through ASR-based Transcriptions: Exploring the Impact of Punctuation and Pausescited by 5
- 2020Fantastic Features and Where to Find Them: Detecting Cognitive Impairment with a Subsequence Classification Guided Approachcited by 4
- 2023Reformulating NLP tasks to Capture Longitudinal Manifestation of Language Disorders in People with Dementiacited by 4
- 2024HAFFormer: A Hierarchical Attention-Free Framework for Alzheimer's Disease Detection From Spontaneous Speechcited by 4
- 2017Idea density for predicting Alzheimer's disease from transcribed speechcited by 3
- 2020Personalized Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease Detection: A Case Study of President Reagan's Speechescited by 3
- 2022Data-driven Approach to Differentiating between Depression and Dementia from Noisy Speech and Language Datacited by 3
- 2024Linguistic-Based Mild Cognitive Impairment Detection Using Informative Losscited by 3
- 2019Detecting dementia in Mandarin Chinese using transfer learning from a parallel corpuscited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 2.
4 papers.
- 2025Dementia Through Different Eyes: Explainable Modeling of Human and LLM Perceptions for Early Awarenesscited by 2
- 2025PersonaDrift: A Benchmark for Temporal Anomaly Detection in Language-Based Dementia Monitoringcited by 0
- 2026ADRD-Bench: A Preliminary LLM Benchmark for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementiascited by 0
- 2026Forgotten Words: Benchmarking NeoBERT for Dementia Detection in Low-Resource Conversational Filipino and English Speechcited by 0
- 2026Forgotten Words: Benchmarking NeoBERT for Dementia Detection in Low-Resource Conversational Filipino and English Speech25 May 2026
- 2026ADRD-Bench: A Preliminary LLM Benchmark for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias12 Feb 2026
- 2025PersonaDrift: A Benchmark for Temporal Anomaly Detection in Language-Based Dementia Monitoring20 Nov 2025
- 2025Dementia Through Different Eyes: Explainable Modeling of Human and LLM Perceptions for Early Awareness19 May 2025