Extraction of Structural and Semantic Features for the Identification of Psychosis in European Portuguese

Psychosis is a brain condition that affects the subject and the way it perceives the world around, impairing its cognitive and speech capabilities, and creating a disconnection from reality in which the subject is inserted. Psychosis lacks formal and pre-cise diagnostic tools, relying on self-reports from patients, their families, and specialized clinicians. Previous studies have fo-cused on the identification and prediction of psychosis through surface-level analysis of diagnosed patients targeting audio, time, and paucity features to predict or identify psychosis. More recent studies have started focusing on high-level and complex language analysis such as semantics, structure, and pragmatics. Only a reduced number of studies have targeted the Portuguese language. Currently, no study has targeted structural or semantic features in European Portuguese, thus this is our objective. The results obtained through our work suggest that the use of structural and semantic features, particularly for European Portuguese, holds some power in classifying subjects as diagnosed with psychosis or not. However, further research is required to identify possible improvements to the techniques employed and to concretely identify which particular features hold the most power during the classification tasks.