Approximating the semantic space: word embedding techniques in psychiatric speech analysis
Claudio Palominos, Rui He, Karla Fröhlich, Rieke Roxanne Mülfarth, Svenja Seuffert, Iris E Sommer, Philipp Homan, Tilo Kircher, Frederike Stein, Wolfram Hinzen · 2024
Read Approximating the semantic space: word embedding techniques in psychiatric speech analysis by Claudio Palominos, Rui He, Karla Fröhlich, Rieke Roxanne Mülfarth, Svenja Seuffert, Iris E Sommer, Philipp Homan, Tilo Kircher, Frederike Stein, Wolfram Hinzen (2024) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11612388.txt.
Description
Claudio Palominos and nine co-authors wrote this 2024 study measuring how meaning itself moves in the speech of psychiatric patients. Language models map words into a geometry of meaning, and earlier work found that in psychosis this space shrinks: words crowd closer together. The team tested picture descriptions from German speakers with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, major depression, and healthy controls.
Both patient groups wandered the meaning space in more restricted ways than controls, taking different routes and covering different total distances. The patterns differed between the two diagnoses even as both echoed the shrinking seen before. The authors argue the dynamics matter, not just the snapshot: how one thought hands off to the next leaves a measurable trace. Such measures could eventually help characterize disordered thinking in numbers rather than impressions.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Claudio Palominos, Rui He, Karla Fröhlich, Rieke Roxanne Mülfarth, Svenja Seuffert, Iris E Sommer, Philipp Homan, Tilo Kircher, Frederike Stein, Wolfram Hinzen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2024 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 45 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |