Rhetorical Relations in the Speech of Alzheimer’s Patients and Healthy Elderly Subjects: An Approach from the RST

Authors

  • Anayeli Paulino Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ingeniería
  • Gerardo Sierra Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ingeniería
  • Laura Hernández-Domínguez ETS, Quebec University, Montréal, Canada
  • Iria da Cunha Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain
  • Gemma Bel-Enguix Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ingeniería, Mexico

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13053/cys-22-3-3028

Keywords:

Rhetorical relations, conversation analysis, alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

The study is aimed to extract discourse relations patterns in conversational speech of subjects with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and adults with healthy aging processes using the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). By means of the RST, we analyzed semi-structured interviews of native Spanish speakers. Seven subjects were in the mild, moderate or advanced stages of AD, and 6 were cognitively intact individuals. The procedure involved the segmentation of each conversational discourse into Semantic Dialog Units (SDUs), the labeling of their rhetorical relations and the construction of tree diagrams. We perform acorrelation analysis to determine the significance of the use of rhetorical relations for each group. We found a significantly (p-value < .05) lower rhetorical relations production density in subjects with AD. We also observed that most rhetorical relations used by healthy older subjects were Elaboration, Concession, Interpretation, Non-Volitional Cause, Solutionhood and Volitional Result.

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Published

2018-09-25

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 3 (2018): Thematic issue on Natural Language Processing (Guest Editor: A. Gelbukh)

Section

Articles of the Thematic Issue

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