Graph Modelling Analysis of Speech-Gesture Interaction for Aphasia Severity Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kollapally, Navya Martin, Akers, Christa, Joseph, Renjith Nelson
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kollapally, Navya Martin
Akers, Christa
Joseph, Renjith Nelson
author_facet Kollapally, Navya Martin
Akers, Christa
Joseph, Renjith Nelson
contents Aphasia is an acquired language disorder caused by injury to the regions of the brain that are responsible for language. Aphasia may impair the use and comprehension of written and spoken language. The Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R) is an assessment tool administered by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to evaluate the aphasia type and severity. Because the WAB-R measures isolated linguistic skills, there has been growing interest in the assessment of discourse production as a more holistic representation of everyday language abilities. Recent advancements in speech analysis focus on automated estimation of aphasia severity from spontaneous speech, relying mostly in isolated linguistic or acoustical features. In this work, we propose a graph neural network-based framework for estimating aphasia severity. We represented each participant's discourse as a directed multi-modal graph, where nodes represent lexical items and gestures and edges encode word-word, gesture-word, and word-gesture transitions. GraphSAGE is employed to learn participant-level embeddings, thus integrating information from immediate neighbors and overall graph structure. Our results suggest that aphasia severity is not encoded in isolated lexical distribution, but rather emerges from structured interactions between speech and gesture. The proposed architecture offers a reliable automated aphasia assessment, with possible uses in bedside screening and telehealth-based monitoring.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_20163
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Modelling Analysis of Speech-Gesture Interaction for Aphasia Severity Estimation
Kollapally, Navya Martin
Akers, Christa
Joseph, Renjith Nelson
Sound
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
Aphasia is an acquired language disorder caused by injury to the regions of the brain that are responsible for language. Aphasia may impair the use and comprehension of written and spoken language. The Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R) is an assessment tool administered by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to evaluate the aphasia type and severity. Because the WAB-R measures isolated linguistic skills, there has been growing interest in the assessment of discourse production as a more holistic representation of everyday language abilities. Recent advancements in speech analysis focus on automated estimation of aphasia severity from spontaneous speech, relying mostly in isolated linguistic or acoustical features. In this work, we propose a graph neural network-based framework for estimating aphasia severity. We represented each participant's discourse as a directed multi-modal graph, where nodes represent lexical items and gestures and edges encode word-word, gesture-word, and word-gesture transitions. GraphSAGE is employed to learn participant-level embeddings, thus integrating information from immediate neighbors and overall graph structure. Our results suggest that aphasia severity is not encoded in isolated lexical distribution, but rather emerges from structured interactions between speech and gesture. The proposed architecture offers a reliable automated aphasia assessment, with possible uses in bedside screening and telehealth-based monitoring.
title Graph Modelling Analysis of Speech-Gesture Interaction for Aphasia Severity Estimation
topic Sound
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20163