I’m very grateful to have received the ELLIS unit Amsterdam travel grant, which enables me to attend the conference in-person. 🙏🏼

📎 You can find the full paper here: aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m...

Our results lay the foundation for improving diagnostic tools with computational methods. Additionally, our work confirms a link between the properties of semantic networks and cognitive health for the Dutch language.

We find that these semantic network-based metrics are more sensitive predictors of cognitive health than the mere tallying of words uttered during the verbal fluency task is.

The metrics we explored are based on semantic networks that are estimated via language models. This ensures that the meaning of the words is incorportard into the scoring of, in our case, the verbal fluency task.

🔎 In short: we investigated whether cognitive decline can be assessed more granularly with metrics grounded in semantics.

This research was conducted as my first big research project in my masters, making it extra special that this will be my first (first-author) publication.

Camera-ready version coming soon!

This work was a collaboration with Luke Korthals, Giacomo Aldegheri, @mdhk.net, and @mheilbron.bsky.social. Special thanks to Marianne and Micha for supervising me during this project.

Check out our extended abstract here: 2025.ccneuro.org/poster/?id=1...