The contribution of prosody to machine classification of schizophrenia

Abstract

We show how acoustic prosodic features, such as pitch and gaps, can be used computationally for detecting symptoms of schizophrenia from a single spoken response. We compare the individual contributions of acoustic and previously-employed text modalities to the algorithmic determination whether the speaker has schizophrenia. Our classification results clearly show that we can extract relevant acoustic features better than those textual ones. We find that, when combined with those acoustic features, textual features improve classification only slightly.