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Detection of Longitudinal Development of Dementia in Literary Writing

Raines, Torri,
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3317-523X
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1524651391474684

Abstract Details

2018, Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, Linguistics (Arts and Sciences).
Past studies have suggested that the progression of dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease, can be detected in the writing of literary authors through analysis of their lexical diversity patterns. However, those studies have used oversimplified measures and vague definitions of lexical diversity. This study uses a multi-faceted, computationally operationalized model of lexical diversity innovated by Scott Jarvis to analyze a total of 129 novels by five authors (three with dementia and two without), with the purpose of identifying the lexical characteristics of dementia in literary writing. A total of 22 novels by two authors with suicidal depression were also analyzed in order to determine whether this condition also leads to changes in authors' lexical diversity patterns. Analyses were conducted with six individual lexical diversity measures and two supplementary lexicosyntactic measures. Results suggest that dementia as well as the effects of healthy aging manifest in different aspects of lexical diversity for different authors, and that this model of lexical diversity is a robust tool for detecting lexical decay indicative of dementia. The model achieves 100% classification accuracy in discriminating between dementia-affected and non-dementia-affected novels. Classification accuracy drops slightly with leave-one-out cross-validation but remains higher than 88% for all dementia group authors.
Scott Jarvis (Committee Member)
David Bell (Committee Chair)
Michelle O'Malley (Committee Member)
107 p.
Computer Science; Linguistics; Literature
lexical diversity; dementia; Alzheimers disease; computational linguistics; corpus linguistics; linguistics and literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Raines, , T. (2018). Detection of Longitudinal Development of Dementia in Literary Writing [Master's thesis, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1524651391474684

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Raines, , Torri. Detection of Longitudinal Development of Dementia in Literary Writing. 2018. Ohio University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1524651391474684.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Raines, , Torri. "Detection of Longitudinal Development of Dementia in Literary Writing." Master's thesis, Ohio University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1524651391474684

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1524651391474684
296
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.