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July 2023 Newsletter | Issue #2

By Paulina Dzialoszynski, Sabrina D. Ford and María F. Alonso

Hello!

Please see below the exciting news coming from Discourse in Psychosis collaborators across the globe.

A note from Montreal!

We had a very successful one day Discourse satellite meeting in Toronto, Canada on May 11th, 2023, with over 40 members from various study sites in attendance. Since then, there is a lot happening in the consortium.

The Indian chapter of Discourse, led by Drs. Venkatsubramanian, Sreeraj & Suhas at NIMHANS, Bengaluru, organised an investigator's meeting on 11th July. They brought together 9 sites across India who are gearing up for data collection. I was lucky to attend this in person. It was inspiring to see the amount of effort going on in India. This reminded me again of the accessibility of speech markers when most of the available resources are dedicated for direct clinical care.

This trip to India costed me the fabulous kick-off meeting at Zurich for the EU TRUSTING study led by Drs. Homan & Sommer. But we will hear more from both groups soon on this very blog space!

We have also finalised a description of the two core committees of Discourse - the Executive and the Program committee. Please see the document linked here that is open for further input from members before being fully adapted.

There is a call for constituting Research Work Groups. Currently we have identified a few broad themes. We anticipate these Work Groups to lead discussions in the coming years at DISCOURSE meetings. If you are interested in joining any, please send your name and interest to Sabrina Ford sford28@uwo.ca

You will also see a blog (Chronicle) that will be a regular feature of our newsletters moving forward. Dr. Gina Kuperberg has kickstarted this with her thoughts on LLMs. We have a few more lined up and I welcome more contributors.

Speak soon,

Lena

Discourse Committees and Work Groups

Please see the attached document for the Discourse Master Governance Plan including a description of all the working groups and committees.

Discourse Chronicle

Please see the attached PDF of Gina Kuperberg’s Blog post.

Seminar Series 2023

We're pleased to announce that the DISCOURSE Seminar Series is back for the rest of 2023! This year we will be highlighting work from the Schizophrenia Bulletin - Language in Psychosis special issue. For your convenience, we will keep seminar details up to date on this public google calendar, which you can subscribe to: https://tinyurl.com/3b568arx

Here's our lineup for Fall 2023!

• September 29th, 2023: 9:00am-10:30am ET- Speaker: Sunny Tang

• October 27th, 2023: 9:00am-10:30am ET- Speaker: Roberto Limongi

• November 17th, 2023: 9:00am-10:30am ET- Rui He & Claudio Palominos

• December 8th, 2023: 9:00am-10:30am ET- Lena Palaniyappan, Iris Sommer, & Hugo Corona Hernandez

Join all seminar dates via zoom: https://northwellhealth.zoom.us/j/6317863737

Additional Seminar

New Projects

A TRUSTworthy speech-based AI monitorING system for the prediction of relapse in individuals with schizophrenia. PI: Iris Sommer

• The TRUSTING project aims to develop a trustworthy AI monitoring system using speech-based features to predict relapse in psychosis. Relapse-predicting speech features will be validated across several languages, participant subgroups and speech tasks. The results will be used to build a speech-based AI monitoring system in the form of a secure and trustworthy e-health application for clinical use. Following this, the efficacy of this clinical application will be tested in a large multicenter randomized clinical trial, covering 6 different languages. Furthermore, cost-effectiveness of the monitoring system will be assessed and a roadmap for protection and commercialization of the project’s results will be defined.

Natural Language Processing to Detect Mental State Effects of Repetitive Sub-Anesthetic IV Ketamine Infusions in Bipolar and Unipolar Depression: A Pilot Study (LaKe). Team: Farida Zaher (supervisor: Lena Palaniyappan)

• Ketamine produces a temporarily altered state of consciousness ("dissociative states") which involves cognitive and perceptual confusion resembling psychosis. We will be examining its effect on speech and language using part of the DISCOURSE speech protocol.

Hyperscanning in Psychosis: A Neurobehavioural Study. Team: Emmanuel Olarewaju (supervisor: Lena Palaniyappan)

• Studying the mechanistic aspects of speech and motor behaviour requires tools that can assess the synchronized activity of two human brains during reciprocal sensorimotor interactions (imitative behaviour) and turn-taking verbal exchanges (discourse). In this study we will explore using electroencephalogram (EEG)-hyperscanning to assess interbrain synchrony during verbal and nonverbal communication among patients and matched control subjects.

Data from the above 2 Montreal projects will be added to the Discourse databank.

Publications

Polygenic risk for schizophrenia and the language network: Putative compensatory reorganization in unaffected siblings. Chen, X. et. al. June 2023. Psychiatry Research, 326, 115319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115319

Theory Driven Analysis of Natural Language Processing Measures of Thought Disorder using Generative Language Modeling. Fradkin I, et al. May 2023. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2023.05.005

Studying psychosis using Natural Language Generation: A review of emerging opportunities. Palaniyappan L, et al. April 2023. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2023.04.009

Widening the temporal window: Coreference delays in psychotic Discourse. Palominos-Flores, C. et. al. March 2023. Schizophrenia Bulletin, https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbac102.

Brain structural network connectivity of formal thought disorder dimensions in affective and psychotic disorders. Stein F, et al. May 2023. Biological psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.05.010

Characterizing and detecting delirium with clinical and computational measures of speech and language disturbance. Tang SX, et al. July 2023. Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. 48(4):E255-64. https://doi.org/10.1503/jpn.230026

Linguistic markers of psychosis in Mandarin chinese: Relations to theory of mind. Zhang, H. et. al. July 2023. Psychiatry Research, 325, 115253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115253

Opportunities

Post-doc opportunity in Quebec, Canada.

The postdoctoral fellow will be under the direct supervision of Dr. Amélie M. Achim (Université Laval) and will be co-supervised by Dr. Lena Palaniyappan (McGill University). The supervisors are building a program of research across the two sites, with the long term goal of building a speech bank for psychiatric research across Quebec.

Post-doc opportunity in Barcelona, Spain.

Looking for a leading postdoctoral researcher within the new EU grant HEu-CL1-TRUSTING-101080251 – “A TRUSTworthy speech-based AI monitorING system for the prediction of relapse in psychosis patients”, Horizon Europe (2021-2027), funded by the European Research Council. The project’s aim is to predict relapse in psychosis through an AI-based speech monitoring system. PI: Wolfram Hinzen

Post-doc opportunity in Tromsø, Norway.

The postdoctoral researcher position is affiliated with ‘TRUSTING’, an EU funded research project where an international interdisciplinary team will develop a machine learning based monitoring system that leverages spoken language processing (SLP) and natural language processing (NLP) of speech recorded at home to calculate relapse risk. Contact: Professor Lars Ailo Bongo & Professor Brita Elvevåg.

Full-stack developer opportunity in Tromsø, Norway.

The main aim for the senior engineer position is to develop the computational infrastructure for voice-based detection of relapse risk for patients with schizophrenia. The position is affiliated with ‘TRUSTING’, an EU funded research project where an international interdisciplinary team will develop a machine learning based monitoring system that leverages spoken language processing (SLP) and natural language processing (NLP) of speech recorded at home to calculate relapse risk. The UiT team will collaborate with the other research teams within the TRUSTING consortium. Contact: Professor Lars Ailo Bongo & Professor Brita Elvevåg

Discourse Protocol

This protocol is intended for producing speech samples to be compiled into a multilingual, benchmark dataset for the purpose of studying language in psychosis. We currently have English, Spanish, German, French, Croatian and Portuguese versions of the task administration protocol.

We have now added protocol versions in Turkish and Hindi.

Please email Dr. Maria Alonso for the latest versions.

Please email sford28@uwo.ca for any updates on grants, publications and events you want to share with the Discourse in Psychosis community

Stay in touch via Twitter (@discourseinpsy) or Slack (discourseinpsychosis.slack.com)