PROCESS-2: A Benchmark Speech Corpus for Early Cognitive Impairment Detection

TL;DR

PROCESS-2 is a large, validated speech dataset designed to advance automatic detection of cognitive impairment through speech analysis, supporting scalable and non-invasive clinical research.

Contribution

The paper introduces PROCESS-2, a comprehensive, clinically validated speech corpus with standardized tasks and metadata, enabling reproducible research in cognitive impairment detection.

Findings

Demonstrated clinically meaningful group separation

Achieved stable baseline modelling performance

Validated dataset quality and demographic balance

Abstract

Speech-based analysis offers a scalable and non-invasive approach for detecting cognitive decline, yet progress has been constrained by the limited availability of clinically validated datasets collected under realistic conditions. We introduce PROCESS-2, a large-scale speech dataset designed to support research on automatic assessment of cognitive impairment from spontaneous and task-oriented speech. The dataset comprises recordings from 200 healthy controls, 150 mild cognitive impairment, and 50 dementia diagnoses collected using the CognoMemory digital assessment platform. Each participant completed a single assessment session, including picture description and verbal fluency tasks, accompanied by manually verified transcripts and participant-level metadata. PROCESS-2 contains approximately 21 hours of speech audio with predefined train/test partitions. Comprehensive technical validation evaluated demographic balance, clinical consistency, recording stability, embedding-space structure, and reproducible baseline modelling performance, demonstrating clinically meaningful group separation and stable performance across modelling approaches while preserving real-world conversational variability. PROCESS-2 is released under controlled access via Hugging Face to enable responsible reuse while protecting participant privacy, providing a reproducible benchmark resource for speech-based cognitive assessment research.