@inproceedings{khanna-stark-2024-preliminary,
    title = "A Preliminary Evaluation of Semantic Coherence and Cohesion in Aphasic and Non-Aphasic Discourse Across Test and Retest",
    author = "Khanna, Snigdha  and
      Stark, Brielle C.",
    editor = "Kokkinakis, Dimitrios  and
      Fraser, Kathleen C.  and
      Themistocleous, Charalambos K.  and
      Fors, Kristina Lundholm  and
      Tsanas, Athanasios  and
      Ohman, Fredrik",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Resources and ProcessIng of linguistic, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic Data from people with various forms of cognitive/psychiatric/developmental impairments @LREC-COLING 2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.rapid-1.9",
    pages = "77--86",
    abstract = "This paper evaluates global and local semantic coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse tasks using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO). The motivation for this paper stems from a lack of automatic methods to evaluate discourse-level phenomena, such as semantic cohesion, in transcripts derived from persons with aphasia. It leverages existing test-retest data to evaluate two main objectives: (1) Test-Retest Reliability, to identify if variables significantly differ across test and retest time points for either group (aphasia, control), and (2) Inter-Group Discourse Cohesion, where aphasic discourse is expected to be less cohesive than control discourse, resulting in lower cohesion scores for the aphasia group. Exploratory analysis examines correlations between variables for both groups, identifying any relationships between word-level and sentence-level semantic variables. Results verify that semantic cohesion and coherence are generally preserved in both groups, except for word-level and a few sentence-level semantic measures,w which are higher for the control group. Overall, variables tend to be reliable across time points for both groups. Notably, the aphasia group demonstrates more variability in cohesion than the control group, which is to be expected after brain injury. A close relationship between word-level indices and other indices is observed, suggesting a disconnection between word-level factors and sentence-level metrics.",
}

This paper evaluates global and local semantic coherence in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse tasks using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO). The motivation for this paper stems from a lack of automatic methods to evaluate discourse-level phenomena, such as semantic cohesion, in transcripts derived from persons with aphasia. It leverages existing test-retest data to evaluate two main objectives: (1) Test-Retest Reliability, to identify if variables significantly differ across test and retest time points for either group (aphasia, control), and (2) Inter-Group Discourse Cohesion, where aphasic discourse is expected to be less cohesive than control discourse, resulting in lower cohesion scores for the aphasia group. Exploratory analysis examines correlations between variables for both groups, identifying any relationships between word-level and sentence-level semantic variables. Results verify that semantic cohesion and coherence are generally preserved in both groups, except for word-level and a few sentence-level semantic measures,w which are higher for the control group. Overall, variables tend to be reliable across time points for both groups. Notably, the aphasia group demonstrates more variability in cohesion than the control group, which is to be expected after brain injury. A close relationship between word-level indices and other indices is observed, suggesting a disconnection between word-level factors and sentence-level metrics.
Khanna, Snigdha Stark, Brielle C.
A Preliminary Evaluation of Semantic Coherence and Cohesion in Aphasic and Non-Aphasic Discourse Across Test and Retest