[2603.26795] HASS: Hierarchical Simulation of Logopenic Aphasic Speech for Scalable PPA Detection

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Audio and Speech Processing arXiv:2603.26795 (eess) [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] Title:HASS: Hierarchical Simulation of Logopenic Aphasic Speech for Scalable PPA Detection Authors:Harrison Li, Kevin Wang, Cheol Jun Cho, Jiachen Lian, Rabab Rangwala, Chenxu Guo, Emma Yang, Lynn Kurteff, Zoe Ezzes, Willa Keegan-Rodewald, Jet Vonk, Siddarth Ramkrishnan, Giada Antonicelli, Zachary Miller, Marilu Gorno Tempini, Gopala Anumanchipalli View a PDF of the paper titled HASS: Hierarchical Simulation of Logopenic Aphasic Speech for Scalable PPA Detection, by Harrison Li and 15 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Building a diagnosis model for primary progressive aphasia (PPA) has been challenging due to the data scarcity. Collecting clinical data at scale is limited by the high vulnerability of clinical population and the high cost of expert labeling. To circumvent this, previous studies simulate dysfluent speech to generate training data. However, those approaches are not comprehensive enough to simulate PPA as holistic, multi-level phenotypes, instead relying on isolated dysfluencies. To address this, we propose a novel, clinically grounded simulation framework, Hierarchical Aphasic Speech Simulation (HASS). HASS aims to simulate behaviors of logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA) with varying degrees of severity. To this end, semantic, phonological, and temporal deficits of lvPPA are systematically identified by clinical experts, ...