Listening Between the Lines: Joint Learning of ASR Embeddings and LLM-Augmented Linguistics for Dementia Detection

Olivier Jiyoun Jung; Jonghyeon Park; Myungwoo Oh

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arXiv · 2606.30675

Listening Between the Lines: Joint Learning of ASR Embeddings and LLM-Augmented Linguistics for Dementia Detection

Olivier Jiyoun Jung·Jonghyeon Park·Myungwoo Oh

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Abstract

Early detection of dementia through speech analysis offers a non-invasive screening alternative, but capturing both acoustic and linguistic biomarkers remains challenging. We propose a multimodal framework leveraging Whisper for dual-purpose extraction: acoustic representations from encoder outputs and transcripts via automatic speech recognition (ASR). For the acoustic pathway, temporal networks with attention pooling aggregate variable-length sequences into fixed-dimensional embeddings. For the linguistic pathway, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to extract interpretable features spanning lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic coherence, and discourse patterns. A gated fusion network integrates both modalities. On ADReSS and ADReSSo, our method achieves F1-scores of 89.47% and 90.14%, demonstrating effective integration of acoustic and LLM-augmented linguistic features. Ablation shows that multimodal fusion consistently outperforms either modality alone.

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Olivier Jiyoun Jung, Jonghyeon Park, Myungwoo Oh. 2026-06-26. Listening Between the Lines: Joint Learning of ASR Embeddings and LLM-Augmented Linguistics for Dementia Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30675

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