A cross-dataset study on automatic detection of autism spectrum disorder from text data

The goals of this article are as follows. First, to investigate the possibility of detecting autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from text data using the latest generation of machine learning tools. Second, to compare model performance on two datasets of transcribed statements, collected using two different diagnostic tools. Third, to investigate the feasibility of knowledge transfer between models trained on both datasets and check if data augmentation can help alleviate the problem of a small number of observations.

We explore two techniques to detect ASD. The first one is based on fine-tuning HerBERT, a BERT-based, monolingual deep transformer neural network. The second one uses the newest, multipurpose text embeddings from OpenAI and a classifier. We apply the methods to two separate datasets of transcribed statements, collected using two different diagnostic tools: thought, language, and communication (TLC) and autism diagnosis observation schedule-2 (ADOS-2). We conducted several cross-dataset experiments in both a zero-shot setting and a setting where models are pretrained on one dataset and then training continues on another to test the possibility of knowledge transfer.

Unlike previous studies, the models we tested obtained average results on ADOS-2 data but reached very good performance of the models in TLC. We did not observe any benefits from knowledge transfer between datasets. We observed relatively poor performance of models trained on augmented data and hypothesize that data augmentation by back translation obfuscates autism-specific signals.

The quality of machine learning models that detect ASD from text data is improving, but model results are dependent on the type of input data or diagnostic tool.