TY - GEN
T1 - Measuring idiosyncratic interests in children with autism
AU - Rouhizadeh, Masoud
AU - Prud'Hommeaux, Emily
AU - Van Santen, Jan
AU - Sproat, Richard
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Association for Computational Linguistics.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - A defining symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the presence of re-stricted and repetitive activities and inter-ests, which can surface in language as a perseverative focus on idiosyncratic top-ics. In this paper, we use semantic similarity measures to identify such idiosyn-cratic topics in narratives produced by children with and without ASD. We find that neurotypical children tend to use the same words and semantic concepts when retelling the same narrative, while chil-dren with ASD, even when producing ac-curate retellings, use different words and concepts relative not only to neurotypical children but also to other children with ASD. Our results indicate that children with ASD not only stray from the target topic but do so in idiosyncratic ways ac-cording to their own restricted interests.
AB - A defining symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the presence of re-stricted and repetitive activities and inter-ests, which can surface in language as a perseverative focus on idiosyncratic top-ics. In this paper, we use semantic similarity measures to identify such idiosyn-cratic topics in narratives produced by children with and without ASD. We find that neurotypical children tend to use the same words and semantic concepts when retelling the same narrative, while chil-dren with ASD, even when producing ac-curate retellings, use different words and concepts relative not only to neurotypical children but also to other children with ASD. Our results indicate that children with ASD not only stray from the target topic but do so in idiosyncratic ways ac-cording to their own restricted interests.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84944052943&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.3115/v1/p15-2035
DO - 10.3115/v1/p15-2035
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84944052943
T3 - ACL-IJCNLP 2015 - 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
SP - 212
EP - 217
BT - ACL-IJCNLP 2015 - 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
T2 - 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2015
Y2 - 26 July 2015 through 31 July 2015
ER -