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arXiv · 2005.10219

BlaBla: Linguistic Feature Extraction for Clinical Analysis in Multiple Languages

Abhishek Shivkumar·Jack Weston·Raphael Lenain·Emil Fristed
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Abstract

We introduce BlaBla, an open-source Python library for extracting linguistic features with proven clinical relevance to neurological and psychiatric diseases across many languages. BlaBla is a unifying framework for accelerating and simplifying clinical linguistic research. The library is built on state-of-the-art NLP frameworks and supports multithreaded/GPU-enabled feature extraction via both native Python calls and a command line interface. We describe BlaBla's architecture and clinical validation of its features across 12 diseases. We further demonstrate the application of BlaBla to a task visualizing and classifying language disorders in three languages on real clinical data from the AphasiaBank dataset. We make the codebase freely available to researchers with the hope of providing a consistent, well-validated foundation for the next generation of clinical linguistic research.

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Abhishek Shivkumar, Jack Weston, Raphael Lenain, Emil Fristed. 2020-05-20. BlaBla: Linguistic Feature Extraction for Clinical Analysis in Multiple Languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.10219

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