title: Semantic mapping reveals distinct patterns in descriptions of social relations in adults with autism spectrum disorder.
abstract: Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may describe other individuals differently compared with typical adults. In this study, we first asked participants to describe closely related individuals such as parents and close friends with 10 positive and 10 negative characteristics. We then used standard natural language processing methods to digitize and visualize these descriptions. The complex patterns of these descriptive sentences exhibited a difference in semantic space between individuals with ASD and control participants. Machine learning algorithms were able to automatically detect and discriminate between these two groups. Furthermore, we showed that these descriptive sentences from adults with ASD exhibited fewer connections as defined by word-word co-occurrences in descriptions, and these connections in words formed a less "small-world" like network. Autism Res 2016, 9: 846-853. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
authors.affiliation: Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 1051 Riverside Drive, Unit 66, New York, 10032, New York.
authors.forename: Sean X
authors.initials: SX
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.affiliation: Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 1051 Riverside Drive, Unit 66, New York, 10032, New York.
authors.forename: Jacqueline A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Shinall
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Institute for the Developing Mind, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, 4650 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, California, 90027.
authors.forename: Bradley S
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Peterson
authors.affiliation: Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 1051 Riverside Drive, Unit 66, New York, 10032, New York.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Gerber
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D005190:Family / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012660:Semantics; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: autism spectrum disorder; classification; latent semantic indexing; machine learning; semantic web; small-world network