Speech2Dementia: A Novel Deep Learning Framework Integrating Enhanced CNN and Large Language Models for Automatic Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia

Abstract

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for early intervention, but current diagnostic tools tend to use unimodal methods, processing either speech or text separately. Although models such as the ComParE Baseline for audio and BERT-based text classifiers have been successful, they do not take advantage of the complementary strengths of both modalities, which restricts their diagnostic power. To overcome this, we suggest SPID-AD (Speech-Based Intelligent Detection of Alzheimer's Dementia), a multimodal deep-learning approach that combines linguistic and acoustic features for the automated detection of Alzheimer's. Our approach uses a BERT-based architecture to mine semantic patterns from transcripts and an augmented Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to process Mel-spectrogram representations of speech. By combining these features in dense layers, the model retains language-related as well as auditory biomarkers of cognitive impairment. Assessed on the DementiaBank Pitt Corpus, SPID-AD has 95.6% classification accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art models in precision, recall, and F1-score. The findings demonstrate the strength of multimodal analysis in detecting dementia speech patterns, providing a non-invasive, AI-based diagnostic tool that may assist clinicians in the early detection of Alzheimer's.