Detecting semantic changes in Alzheimer’s disease with vector space models

Numerous studies have shown that language impairments, particularly semantic deficits, are evident in the narrative speech of people with Alzheimer’s disease from the earliest stages of the disease. Here, we present a novel technique for capturing those changes, by comparing distributed word representations constructed from healthy controls and Alzheimer’s patients. We investigate examples of words with different representations in the two spaces, and link the semantic and contextual differences to findings from the Alzheimer’s