Segment-Level Mandarin Chinese Speech-Based Cognitive Impairment Detection via an Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning

\noindent\textbf{Background and Objective:} Speech has emerged as a low-cost and non-invasive digital biomarker with considerable potential for cognitive impairment detection. However, limited labeled data and cross-dataset variability remain major challenges for robust speech-based screening systems. \par\noindent\textbf{Methods:} We developed a segment-level representation learning framework for speech-based cognitive impairment detection. Speech recordings were divided into short segments and converted into spectrogram representations. To improve robustness under limited-data conditions, offline and online augmentation strategies were combined with autoencoder-based representation learning and contrastive objectives to enhance discriminative latent representations. \par\noindent\textbf{Results:} Experiments conducted on four independent Mandarin Chinese speech datasets demonstrated stable and competitive performance in both binary and three-class classification tasks, with particularly notable improvements in the clinically challenging three-class setting. Ablation studies further supported the effectiveness of the proposed framework. \par\noindent\textbf{Conclusions:} The findings suggest that segment-level speech representation learning may provide a scalable and practical approach for cognitive impairment screening in resource-constrained clinical settings.

Data2Concept2Text: An Explainable Multilingual Framework for Data Analysis Narration

This paper presents a complete explainable system that interprets a set of data, abstracts the underlying features and describes them in a natural language of choice. The system relies on two crucial stages: (i) identifying emerging properties from data and transforming them into abstract concepts, and (ii) converting these concepts into natural language. Despite the impressive natural language generation capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models, their statistical nature and the intricacy of their internal mechanism still force us to employ these techniques as black boxes, forgoing trustworthiness. Developing an explainable pipeline for data interpretation would allow facilitating its use in safety-critical environments like processing medical information and allowing non-experts and visually impaired people to access narrated information. To this end, we believe that the fields of knowledge representation and automated reasoning research could present a valid alternative. Expanding on prior research that tackled the first stage (i), we focus on the second stage, named Concept2Text. Being explainable, data translation is easily modeled through logic-based rules, once again emphasizing the role of declarative programming in achieving AI explainability. This paper explores a Prolog/CLP-based rewriting system to interpret concepts-articulated in terms of classes and relations, plus common knowledge-derived from a generic ontology, generating natural language text. Its main features include hierarchical tree rewritings, modular multilingual generation, support for equivalent variants across semantic, grammar, and lexical levels, and a transparent rule-based system. We outline the architecture and demonstrate its flexibility through some examples capable of generating numerous diverse and equivalent rewritings based on the input concept.

Survey on Abstractive Text Summarization: Dataset, Models, and Metrics

The advancements in deep learning, particularly the introduction of transformers, have been pivotal in enhancing various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These include text-to-text applications such as machine translation, text classification, and text summarization, as well as data-to-text tasks like response generation and image-to-text tasks such as captioning. Transformer models are distinguished by their attention mechanisms, pretraining on general knowledge, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. This has led to significant improvements, particularly in abstractive summarization, where sections of a source document are paraphrased to produce summaries that closely resemble human expression. The effectiveness of these models is assessed using diverse metrics, encompassing techniques like semantic overlap and factual correctness. This survey examines the state of the art in text summarization models, with a specific focus on the abstractive summarization approach. It reviews various datasets and evaluation metrics used to measure model performance. Additionally, it includes the results of test cases using abstractive summarization models to underscore the advantages and limitations of contemporary transformer-based models. The source codes and the data are available at https://github.com/gospelnnadi/Text-Summarization-SOTA-Experiment.