Connectionists: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech

[DE LA FUENTE GARCIA Sofia]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech

     The ADReSSo Challenge, at INTERSPEECH 2021,
        Brno, Czechia, 30 Aug - 03 Sep, 2021

Dementia is a category of neurodegenerative diseases that entails a
long-term and usually gradual decrease of cognitive functioning. There
is a need for cost-effective and scalable methods for detection of
dementia from its most subtle forms, such as the preclinical stage of
Subjective Memory Loss (SML), to more severe conditions like Mild
Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Dementia (AD) itself.

The ADReSSo (ADReSS, speech only) targets difficult automatic prediction
problems of societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of AD
and prediction of cognitive decline.  The ADReSSo Challenge will provide
a forum for those different research groups to test their existing
methods (or develop novel approaches) on a shared standardized
dataset. The approaches that performed best in last year's ADReSS
challenge employed features extracted from manual transcripts, which
were provided to the participants. The ADReSSo challenge provides a more
challenging and improved spontaneous speech dataset, and requires the
creation of models straight from speech, without manual
transcription. In keeping with the objectives of AD prediction
evaluation, the ADReSSo challenge's dataset is statistically balanced so
as to mitigate common biases often overlooked in evaluations of AD
detection methods, including repeated occurrences of speech from the
same participant (common in longitudinal datasets), variations in audio
quality, and imbalances of gender and age distribution.

This task focuses AD recognition using spontaneous speech, which marks a
departure from neuropsychological and clinical evaluation
approaches. Spontaneous speech analysis has the potential to enable
novel applications for speech technology in longitudinal, unobtrusive
monitoring of cognitive health, in line with the theme of this year's
INTERSPEECH, "Speech Everywhere!".

In order to participate, please follow the instructions in the ADReSSo
Challenge's web site ( https://edin.ac/3p1cyaI ). You will also be expected
to submit a paper to INTERSPEECH 2021 describing your approach and
results.

Important Dates

    January 18, 2021: ADReSSo Challenged announced.
    March 20, 2021: Model submission deadline.
    March 26, 2021: Paper submission deadline.
    April 2, 2021: Paper update deadline.
    June 2, 2021: Paper acceptance/rejection notification.
    August 31 - September 3, 2021: INTERSPEECH 2021.

URL

    https://edin.ac/3p1cyaI

Organizers

    Saturnino Luz, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh
    Fasih Haider, University of Edinburgh
    Sofia de la Fuente, University of Edinburgh
    Davida Fromm, Carnegie Mellon University
    Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon University



The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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