Abhishek Shivkumar

Abhishek Shivkumar, Jack Weston, Raphael Lenain et al.

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.

Raphael Lenain, Jack Weston, Abhishek Shivkumar et al.

We introduce Surfboard, an open-source Python library for extracting audio features with application to the medical domain. Surfboard is written with the aim of addressing pain points of existing libraries and facilitating joint use with modern machine learning frameworks. The package can be accessed both programmatically in Python and via its command line interface, allowing it to be easily integrated within machine learning workflows. It builds on state-of-the-art audio analysis packages and offers multiprocessing support for processing large workloads. We review similar frameworks and describe Surfboard's architecture, including the clinical motivation for its features. Using the mPower dataset, we illustrate Surfboard's application to a Parkinson's disease classification task, highlighting common pitfalls in existing research. The source code is opened up to the research community to facilitate future audio research in the clinical domain.