The Corpus Anchise 320 and the Analysis of Conversations between Healthcare Workers and People with Dementia
Authors: Nicola Benvenuti, Andrea Bolioli, Alessio Bosca, Alessandro Mazzei, Pietro Vigorelli (Università di Torino, CELI Language Technology, Gruppo Anchise, 2020)
Topic: Multimodal

Abstract
The aim of this research was to create the first Italian corpus of free conversations between healthcare professionals and people with dementia, in order to investigate specific linguistic phenomena from a computational point of view. Most of the previous researches on speech disorders of people with dementia have been based on qualitative analysis, or on the study of a few dozen cases executed in laboratory conditions, and not in spontaneous speech (in particular for the Italian language). The creation of the Corpus Anchise 320 aims to investigate Dementia language by providing a broader number of dialogues collected in ecological conditions. Automatic linguistic analysis can help healthcare professionals to understand some characteristics of the language used by patients and to implement effective dialogue strategies.

Introduction
In this paper we will present the construction of the first annotated corpus of conversations between healthcare workers and people with dementia for Italian, called “Corpus Anchise 320”, and the quantitative linguistic analysis we carried out. The aim of the project is twofold. On the one hand, we created a dataset of spoken dialogue transcriptions that is useful for research on the language of people with dementia. On the other hand, techniques typical of computational linguistics are applied to help doctors in assessing the state of the disease and implement effective dialogue strategies. Focusing attention on verbal exchanges between speakers is one of the cornerstones of the approach developed by the Anchise Group to support people with dementia and their caregivers, i.e. the “Enabling Approach” (Vigorelli 2018). The paper is divided in 4 sections. Section 1 introduces the topic of Alzheimer’s language Section 2 presents the recent researches and related works. In Section 3, the creation of the Corpus Anchise 320 will be discussed, which collects the transcripts and annotations of a set of dialogues between healthcare professionals and dementia patients carried out by the Anchise Group from 2007 until today, in Italian language. Section 4 will report the results of the computational linguistic analysis with the StanfordNLP library for Italian. The results obtained will be discussed to outline some of the peculiarities of the Dementia language. Section 5 concludes this paper with some final considerations.

Conclusion
In this paper we presented the first Italian corpus of conversations between healthcare professionals and people with dementia, called “Corpus Anchise 320”. The study of this corpus with computational linguistic analysis confirmed some characteristics of the language of people with dementia, such as the reduction in the rate of names and the increase in deictics. Corpus Anchise 320 has been built and archived according to GDPR. It is not publicly available but it can be requested to the authors for research purposes. The large number of the sample (320 conversations) and the use of computational analysis will make it possible to identify indicators of pathological language to be used in the preclinical phase, to trace the change in the linguistic abilities of people with dementia as the disease progresses, to put in relation the characteristics of the pathological language with a series of metalinguistic data such as age, sex and degree of dementia. The corpus will be increased in the coming months with the addition and annotation of other transcripts of dialogues of people with dementia.