Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders

Building Language Resources for Exploring Autism Spectrum Disorders Julia Parish-Morris ★, Christopher Cieri◦, Mark Liberman◦, Leila Bateman ★, Emily Ferguson ★, Robert T. Schultz ★ ◦Linguistic Data Consortium. University of Pennsylvania 3600 Market Street, Suite 810, Philadelphia, PA, 19104 USA ★Center for Autism Research. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia 3535 Market Street, Suite 860, Philadelphia, PA, 19104 USA Corresponding Author: julia.parish.morris AT gmail.com Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that would benefit from low-cost and reliable improvements to screening and diagnosis. Human language technologies (HLTs) provide one possible route to automating a series of subjective decisions that currently inform “Gold Standard” diagnosis based on clinical judgment. In this paper, we describe a new resource to support this goal, comprised of 100 20-minute semi-structured English language samples labeled with child age, sex, IQ, autism symptom severity, and diagnostic classification. We assess the feasibility of digitizing and processing sensitive clinical samples for data sharing, and identify areas of difficulty. Using the methods described here, we propose to join forces with researchers and clinicians throughout the world to establish an international repository of annotated language samples from individuals with ASD and related disorders. This project has the potential to improve the lives of individuals with ASD and their families by identifying linguistic features that could improve remote screening, inform personalized intervention, and promote advancements in clinically- oriented HLTs. Keywords: language resources, collection, annotation, data distribution, quality control, autism spectrum disorder 1. Introduction Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a brain-based developmental condition that affects a growing number of individuals across the globe (Baxter et al., 2015; Elsabbagh et al., 2012). In the U.S., approximately 1 in 68 school children are identified having an ASD (Blumberg et al., 2013), with prevalence ranging from 1 in 38 in South Korea (Elsabbagh et al., 2012), to 1 in 100 in Iceland (Saemundsen, Magnússon, Georgsdóttir, Egilsson, & Rafnsson, 2013), 1 in 115 in Mexico (Fombonne et al., 2016), 1 in 124 in Sweden (Gillberg, Cederlund, Lamberg, & Zeijlon, 2006), 1 in 146 in Denmark (Parner et al., 2011), 1 in 196 in Western Australia (Parner et al., 2011), and 1 in 263 in the U.K. (Taylor, Jick, & MacLaughlin, 2013). These relatively high numbers have significant economic consequences. In 2014, the annual public health cost of ASD in the United States was projected to reach into the billions of dollars (Lavelle et al., 2014) and the lifetime per capita incremental societal cost of ASD was estimated to be nearly $2.5 million in both the U.S. and the U.K. (Buescher, Cidav, Knapp, & Mandell, 2014). Access to swift, accurate, low-cost diagnosis is one of the most significant challenges in autism today, and could be greatly aided by targeted advancements in Human Language Technologies (HLT). Consensus practice parameters recommend multidisciplinary assessment of children suspected of having ASD (Volkmar et al., 2014). Of course, many children across the world do not have access to a single healthcare provider that is knowledgeable about ASD, much less a highly trained …

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