The DISCOURSE in psychosis (London Ontario): A speech dataset to examine communication disturbances in early-stage psychosis

Advances in speech technology and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have demonstrated promise in using speech as a valid source of data to detect features of psychosis. These technologies can potentially detect subtle speech aberrations that often go unnoticed by clinicians and family members. However, research in this area is hindered by a significant limitation: a lack of sufficient and appropriate speech corpora from psychosis patients, especially datasets containing naturalistic speech that reflects typical clinical interactions. This scarcity limits the development, testing, and generalization of new computational methods for psychosis prediction. To address this gap, our new dataset offers naturalistic speech samples collected using the semi-structured DISCOURSE protocol. This resource includes both raw audio recordings and transcribed speech from individuals participating in an early-stage psychosis treatment program (