University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2011 Mar;43(1):136-44. doi: 10.3758/s13428-010-0037-9.
Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demonstrate the application of computational linguistic methods to automate the analysis of grammatical complexity. We implemented the Computerized Linguistic Analysis System (CLAS) based on the Stanford syntactic parser (Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407-1419, 2005) for longitudinal analysis of changes in syntactic complexity in language affected by neurodegenerative disorders. We manually validated CLAS scoring and used it to analyze writings of Iris Murdoch, a renowned Irish author diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. We found clear patterns of decline in grammatical complexity consistent with previous analyses of Murdoch's writing conducted by Garrard, Maloney, Hodges, and Patterson (Brain, 128(250-260, 2005). CLAS is a fully automated system that may be used to derive objective and reproducible measures of syntactic complexity in language production and can be particularly useful in longitudinal studies with large volumes of language samples.
目前，针对阿尔茨海默病等神经退行性疾病的语言表现的研究多数基于人工语言分析。语法复杂度是对阿尔茨海默病影响敏感的语言使用特征之一，用人工方法难以操作和测量。本研究展示了计算语言学方法在语法复杂度分析中的自动化应用。我们基于斯坦福句法分析器（Klein and Manning, Pattern Recognition, 38(9), 1407-1419, 2005）实现了计算机语言分析系统（CLAS），用于对受神经退行性疾病影响的语言中的句法复杂度变化进行纵向分析。我们对 CLAS 评分进行了手动验证，并使用它来分析被诊断为阿尔茨海默病的著名爱尔兰作家 Iris Murdoch 的作品。我们发现语法复杂度明显下降的模式，与 Garrard、Maloney、Hodges 和 Patterson（Brain, 128(250-260, 2005）之前对 Murdoch 作品的分析一致。CLAS 是一个完全自动化的系统，可用于得出语言产生中语法复杂度的客观、可重复的度量，在语言样本量较大的纵向研究中特别有用。
