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October 2023 Newsletter | Issue #3

Shared on behalf of Dr. Lena Palaniyappan & the Discourse Executive Committee.

By Paulina Dzialoszynski and María F. Alonso

Hello!

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

A note from Montreal:

Hello everyone,

Another short note to inform you on what is happening in the consortium.

We now have members expressing interest in 5 working groups connected to each other. These groups – on Clinical Harmonisation, Methods Development, Mechanisms and Models/Theory of Language, Clinical Translation and Industry/stakeholder collaborations – will provide structure to the activities of the network. Scroll down to find a call from Sunny Tang and Frederike Stein who are leading the Clinical Harmonisation group. We anticipate leads/co-leads for other workgroups to be identified within the groups soon and interesting projects to emerge. If you are interested in joining one, please reach out to Paulina or Betsy.

Discourse 2024 Meeting will be in Pavia, Italy – thanks to Valentina Bambini and Marta Bosia for hosting us all. This will be a satellite meeting alongside SIRS in Florence. More details below, and suggestions for the program are welcome.

This issue carries a blog from Alban Voppel and me on Cloze test and predictability. If you want to write a blog for the next year editions, please drop a line. Our newsletter is now reaching 240 attentive members across the world.

Sabrina Ford who was supporting the newsletter has now moved on to a different role, Paulina is supporting all communications now. Best wishes Sabrina, and thanks for all your good work, Paulina!

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.

Call for Collaboration on Clinical Harmonization Effort

The clinical harmonization working group is undertaking an effort to harmonize methods for obtaining clinical ratings on thought disorder and speech and language disturbances. As a part of this effort, we are planning to look at ways to convert between rating scales, and/or creating a centralized factor-based approach. It would be particularly valuable to have participants rated on one or more of the following: TALD, TLI, TLC, SANS/SAPS, CDI. If you have clinical rating data that might be appropriate for this effort, please contact Frederike Stein (frederike.stein@staff.uni-marburg.de) or Sunny Tang (stang3@northwell.edu), and/or fill out this database with information on the data available: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GdtyWD1BMHVJ6fUlnR9fs3DoPjOrf79cNsmHf7VlRKY/edit?usp=sharing

Discourse Chronicle

Please see the attached PDF of Alban Voppel & Lena Palaniyappan’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!

• 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

Calling all DISCOURSE members!

We are soliciting ideas, referrals, and volunteers for our 2024 seminar series. Please reach out to Sunny Tang at stang3@northwell.edu if you have a recommendation or would like to participate. We’d also love to include additional members as moderators/hosts, in addition to speakers.

Discourse Satellite Meeting at SIRS 2024

After a successful satellite meeting in Toronto this past spring, the Discourse planning committee is suggesting another meeting after the Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) Conference in Florence, Italy.

Valentina Bambini and Marta Bosia have graciously offered to host a 2024 Discourse Satellite Meeting on April 8th, 2024 in Pavia, Italy. We are expecting working group discussions, updates on the speech bank data acquisition, and to hear about the exciting progress being made by our Italian colleagues. More suggestions to the program committee are welcome. Please email Betsy.Schaefer@lhsc.on.ca to provide your input.

We anticipate being able to support a small number of trainees/ECRs with a partial travel support (yet to be finalised).

New Projects

Predicting Psychotic Relapse Using Speech-Based Early-Detection (MOTS)

PI: Lena Palaniyappan, Co-PI: Amelie Achim, Katie Lavigne

This project aims to develop a speech-based clinical tool for psychosis. Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia are higher among minorities facing social disadvantages, including linguistic differences. Risk factors such as substance use that increase risk of relapse and hospital admissions are notably high among official language minorities. The clinical prediction tool that we develop will predict if a patient is going to suffer a relapse or not in near future. We will use Natural Language Processing approaches in this study. To ensure linguistic minorities are not excluded, this study will develop the tool for both Francophones and Anglophones.

We will look to answer two key questions:

1. Can we predict impending relapses using speech in the early stages of psychosis, up to four weeks before they occur?

2. Will speech-based relapse prediction be valid across languages (French and English), sex, and immigrant status?

We will also explore if a speech-based model is more sensitive than symptom-based warning signs and in what way the two can be combined to provide a more accurate model.

Data from the above project will be added to the Discourse databank.

Publications

Natural Language Processing in Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience Research. Special issue edited by Nour, M. & Hays, Q. J. M. October 2023. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/issue/S2451-9022(22)X0011-6

Trajectories through semantic spaces in schizophrenia and the relationship to ripple bursts. Nour, M. et. al. October 2023. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(42). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305290120

Disorganized communication and social dysfunction in schizophrenia: Emerging concepts and methods. Olarewaju E, Dumas G, Palaniyappan L. Current Psychiatry Reports. 2023 Sep 23:1-1. DOI: 10.1007/s11920-023-01462-4

Linguistic markers of psychosis in Mandarin Chinese: Relations to theory of mind. Zhang H, Parola A, Zhou Y, Wang H, Bliksted V, Fusaroli R, Hinzen W. Psychiatry Research. 2023 Jul 1;325:115253. DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115253

Additional Articles and Media

• Podcast: Could AI help diagnose schizophrenia?

  Madeleine Finlay meets neuroscientist and psychiatrist Matthew Nour, whose research looks at how artificial intelligence could help doctors and scientists bring precision to diagnosis of psychiatric conditions. He describes his latest study looking at patients with schizophrenia, and explains how he thinks large language models such as ChatGPT could one day be used in the clinic.

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. Please contact Amelie Achim (amelie.achim@fmed.ulaval.ca)

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 Santander, Spain.

Dr. Rosa Ayesa Arriola at IDIVAL, Santander is looking for a postdoctoral associate to make progress on the DISCOURSE data acquisition (adults with psychosis, their relatives and controls from the PAFIP-FAMILIES cohort) and from the INNVAL project (24-month-old children from the COGESTCV-19 cohort). The job is not posted yet, but enquiries, preferably from those who can speak Spanish, can be made by email to rayesa@idival.org. You can also meet her/her team at Congreso Nacional de Psiquiatría in Salamanca if you happen to be there.

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, Turkish, Hindi, and Portuguese versions of the task administration protocol.

We have now added protocol versions in Tamil and Mandarin Chinese as well (these two are not uploaded yet but drop a line if you want to access them).

Please email Dr. Maria Alonso for the latest versions.

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

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