arXiv AI

Topic Matching in the Wild: Benchmark and Lessons from Real-World ASR Transcripts

The paper introduces a benchmark for topic matching in real-world ASR transcripts from contact centers, where noisy, punctuation‑free speech data must be classified into predefined topics. It presents a human‑annotated dataset of topic‑utterance judgments and evaluates three matcher types—regex, zero‑shot sentence embeddings, and Gemini‑based LLMs—using two topic representations: keyphrases and natural language descriptions. Experiments show that lightweight LLM matchers outperform the other methods, especially when natural language descriptions are used.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened

Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.

arXiv AI
Jun 18

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

arXiv:2606. 19325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings.

By Michael Finkelson, Daniel Segal, Eitan Richardson, Shahar Armon, Nani Goldring, Poriya Panet, Nir Zabari, Benjamin Brazowski, Or Patashnik, Yoav HaCohen
arXiv AI
Aug 28

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.

By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

The Bairong System for MLC-SLM 2026: Dynamic Question-Aware Evidence Routing for Multilingual Conversational Speech Understanding

arXiv:2609.22214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long multilingual conversational spoken question answering requires systems to balance long-range transcript semantics with sparse acoustic and speaker...

By Shangkun Huang, Junchao Hu, Huan Shen, Guoji Wang, Yingao Wang, Shaosai Li, Wei Zou, Yunzhang Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 26

From Gradient-Boosted Trees to Deep Recommenders: Practical Lessons from Migrating a Production Customer Support Recommender

The paper documents the migration of a live conversational recommendation system from a gradient‑boosted multiclass model to a pairwise‑binary deep recommender. It explains how reformulating the task, using negative sampling, noise injection, and attention pooling over transcript chunks enabled the new model to handle dynamic, multimodal data and long conversation context. The authors compare several architectures and loss functions, showing that the deep recommender matches or surpasses the CatBoost baseline, especially in later conversational stages.

By Sonia Sharma, Jeyendran Balakrishnan, Shreya Rajpal, Swapnil Parekh, Nagaraj Janardhana, Andrew Mattarella-Micke
arXiv AI
Sep 17

VoiceTrace: A Benchmark and Retrieval Framework for Who-Said-What Speech Retrieval

VoiceTrace introduces a new benchmark, VoiceTrace-Bench, for hybrid speech retrieval that combines a textual query specifying "what" to retrieve with a reference speech specifying "who" to retrieve. The authors propose a two‑stage framework: VoiceTrace‑Emb, which learns unified audio‑text embeddings for efficient large‑scale retrieval, and VoiceTrace‑Reranker, which fine‑grains relevance by jointly examining query‑candidate pairs. Experiments show VoiceTrace outperforms existing methods on both traditional semantic speech retrieval benchmarks and the new hybrid setting.

By Aaron Yee, Fengjie Lu, Jiarui Hai, Chenang Jiang, Helin Wang, Siwei Tu, Weitao You, Lingyun Sun