Joppe Wouts

Joppe Wouts, Janna de Boer, Alban Voppel et al.

Natural language processing (NLP) is becoming an important means for automatic recognition of human traits and states, such as intoxication, presence of psychiatric disorders, presence of airway disorders and states of stress. Such applications have the potential to be an important pillar for online help lines, and may gradually be introduced into eHealth modules. However, NLP is language specific and for languages such as Dutch, NLP models are scarce. As a result, recent Dutch NLP models have a low capture of long range semantic dependencies over sentences. To overcome this, here we present belabBERT, a new Dutch language model extending the RoBERTa architecture. belabBERT is trained on a large Dutch corpus (+32 GB) of web crawled texts. We applied belabBERT to the classification of psychiatric illnesses. First, we evaluated the strength of text-based classification using belabBERT, and compared the results to the existing RobBERT model. Then, we compared the performance of belabBERT to audio classification for psychiatric disorders. Finally, a brief exploration was performed, extending the framework to a hybrid text- and audio-based classification. Our results show that belabBERT outperformed the current best text classification network for Dutch, RobBERT. belabBERT also outperformed classification based on audio alone.

Joppe Valentijn Wouts

Currently, the state of the art for classification of psychiatric illness is based on audio-based classification. This thesis aims to design and evaluate a state of the art text classification network on this challenge. The hypothesis is that a well designed text-based approach poses a strong competition against the state-of-the-art audio based approaches. Dutch natural language models are being limited by the scarcity of pre-trained monolingual NLP models, as a result Dutch natural language models have a low capture of long range semantic dependencies over sentences. For this issue, this thesis presents belabBERT, a new Dutch language model extending the RoBERTa[15] architecture. belabBERT is trained on a large Dutch corpus (+32GB) of web crawled texts. After this thesis evaluates the strength of text-based classification, a brief exploration is done, extending the framework to a hybrid text- and audio-based classification. The goal of this hybrid framework is to show the principle of hybridisation with a very basic audio-classification network. The overall goal is to create the foundations for a hybrid psychiatric illness classification, by proving that the new text-based classification is already a strong stand-alone solution.