# Computerized assessment of linguistic indicators of lucidity in Alzheimer's Disease dementia

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA · 2021 · $228,530

## Abstract

Project Summary
The focus of the parent project (AG069792) is to enable automated detection and analysis of
episodes of unexpected lucidity in individuals with late-stage dementia in which the individual
long thought to have succumbed to dementia and lost most of his or her cognitive abilities
temporarily regains the ability to communicate in a clear and coherent fashion. Towards this
goal, this project aims to develop a) technology for automatic conversion of speech produced by
patients with dementia to text and b) measures of semantic coherence from the transcribed text.
The development of this technology relies on state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning (ML) methods including deep learning and time series analysis. We are
currently developing these approaches using existing datasets including the Carolina
Conversations Corpus (CCC), Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and Dementia Bank (DB)
which contain audio and text transcripts of conversational interviews with patients with dementia
of varying severity and healthy controls. Currently, the researchers in the AI/ML community use
these resources by following individually developed pre-processing procedures that are partially
described in publications resulting from their work and ad hoc code made available in multiple
repositories. The results obtained by various investigators can be difficult to compare because
of individual differences in how the data were processed and prepared for ML experimentation.
For the one-year supplement project, we propose to create an open-source platform consisting
of tools that will ingest original data available from DB, WLS, and CCC datasets and convert
them to be AI/ML-ready in keeping with the current best practices in the AI/ML community.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10412501
- **Project number:** 3R21AG069792-01S1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
- **Principal Investigator:** Martin Michalowski
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $228,530
- **Award type:** 3
- **Project period:** 2020-09-15 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10412501

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10412501, Computerized assessment of linguistic indicators of lucidity in Alzheimer's Disease dementia (3R21AG069792-01S1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10412501. Licensed CC0.

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