Digital language measures capture episodic memory disruptions in people with human immunodeficiency virus: A machine learning study
<b>Objective:</b> Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often affects episodic memory. Yet, standard measures of this domain are derived from clinicians' simple counts of recalled and omitted pieces of information, undermining robustness, informativeness, and scalability. Here, we present an automated natural language processing (NLP) approach that tackles such limitations. <b>Methods:</b> We recruited 92 participants (50 people living with HIV and 42 controls), who performed a story retelling task. Using NLP tools, we compared the retellings and the original story in terms of verbosity, semantic acuity, and organizational structure. <b>Results:</b> We found that people living with HIV produced fewer nouns and had poorer semantic acuity and organizational similarity. Moreover, machine learning classifiers robustly differentiated between the two groups. <b>Conclusion:</b> These results suggest that our digital approach can reveal fine-grained episodic memory alterations in people living with HIV, offering an objective, scalable, and cost-effective complement to standard cognitive testing.
Authors
- Agustina Birba (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5998-6634)
- Carolina Gattei (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7490-3363)
- Lucía Amoruso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4696-2187)
- Lorena Abusamra (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6787-1738)
- Valeria Abusamra (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2954-8665)
- Franco Ferrante (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6392-0048)
- Bárbara Sampedro
- Gonzalo Nicolás Pérez (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5781-8944)
- Lucas Federico Sterpin
- Adolfo M. García (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6936-0114)
- Jeremías Inchauspe (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6919-7567)
- Camilo Avendaño Avello
Institutions
- Universidad de Santiago de Chile (CL)
- Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (AR)
- Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (AR)
- Universidad de Buenos Aires (AR)
- Centro de Investigación de Métodos Computacionales (AR)
- Centro Científico Tecnológico - San Juan (AR)
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (ES)
- Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (FR)
- St. Thomas Hospital (CA)
- Instituto de Filosofía (ES)
- Hospital Británico de Buenos Aires (AR)
- Global Brain Health Institute (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- The Clinical Neuropsychologist
- Published
- 2025-08-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/13854046.2025.2545943
- Primary Topic
- HIV Research and Treatment
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Alzheimer's Association
- Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica