The MADReSS SPGC targets a difficult automatic prediction problem of societal and medical relevance, namely, the detection of Alzheimer’s Dementia (AD). Dementia is a category of neurodegenerative diseases that entails a long-term and usually gradual decrease of cognitive functioning. While there has been much interest in automated methods for cognitive impairment detection by the signal processing and machine learning communities, most of the proposed approaches have not investigated which speech features can be generalised and transferred across languages for AD prediction, and little work has been done on acoustic features of the speech signal in multilingual AD detection. The MADReSS Challenge targets this issue by defining a prediction task whereby participants train their models based on English speech data and assess their models’ performance on spoken Spanish data. It is expected that the models submitted to the challenge will focus on acoustic features of the speech signal and discover features whose predictive power is preserved across languages, but other approaches can be considered.
Visit the Challenge website for details and more information!
