The lecture by Simon Schweighofer from the CSH Vienna will take place at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna in Room 201.
If you are interested in participating, please email to office@csh.ac.at
Abstract
Affective disorders such as depression, anxiety disorder or PTSD are characterized by a symptom called ‘negative repetitive thinking’: Patients’ thoughts tend to circle around a small set of topics. Conversely, in a state of psychosis, patients often experience ‘flight of thought’, i.e. their thoughts leap from topic to topic, often following only very distant associations. How can we develop metrics to detect these symptoms in spoken or written communication? I discuss and compare several approaches, such as word/text embeddings models, and measures derived from large-scale word association networks. I will also give an outlook on other potential application areas, such as creativity research.