The PARLO Dementia Corpus: A German Multi-Center Resource for Alzheimer's Disease

TL;DR

The PARLO Dementia Corpus is a publicly available German speech dataset from multiple clinics, enabling scalable, non-invasive Alzheimer's detection research through speech analysis and machine learning.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first multi-center, clinically validated German speech dataset for Alzheimer's, including comprehensive metadata and baseline experiments.

Findings

Speech-based assessments show promise for automatic cognitive evaluation.

Recall tasks provide significant diagnostic information.

Baseline models demonstrate feasibility of speech-based AD detection.

Abstract

Early and accessible detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a major challenge, as current diagnostic methods often rely on costly and invasive biomarkers. Speech and language analysis has emerged as a promising non-invasive and scalable approach to detecting cognitive impairment, but research in this area is hindered by the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for languages other than English. This paper introduces the PARLO Dementia Corpus (PDC), a new multi-center, clinically validated German resource for AD collected across nine academic memory clinics in Germany. The dataset comprises speech recordings from individuals with AD-related mild cognitive impairment and mild to moderate dementia, as well as cognitively healthy controls. Speech was elicited using a standardized test battery of eight neuropsychological tasks, including confrontation naming, verbal fluency, word repetition, picture description, story reading, and recall tasks. In addition to audio recordings, the dataset includes manually verified transcriptions and detailed demographic, clinical, and biomarker metadata. Baseline experiments on ASR benchmarking, automated test evaluation, and LLM-based classification illustrate the feasibility of automatic, speech-based cognitive assessment and highlight the diagnostic value of recall-driven speech production. The PDC thus establishes the first publicly available German benchmark for multi-modal and cross-lingual research on neurodegenerative diseases.