Detecting Dementia from Transcribed Speech in Slovak using Pre-trained BERT Models

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the brain and causes a decrease in cognitive abilities that interfere with memory, thinking, and the ability to perform daily activities. Detecting dementia automatically is a difficult task and involves a detailed analysis of speech and language characteristics and an examination of the participant’s mental state. The picture description task is one of the screening tools for dementia detection from transcribed speech, where participants are instructed to describe what they see in a picture. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of available monolingual and multilingual pre-trained BERT models fine-tuned on transcribed Slovak speech from the picture description task with the aim of automatic dementia detection. The results of the F1-score range from 69% to 93% in the binary classification task and are comparable with recently published studies in this area.