arXiv Computation and Language

DiaWhisper-DPO: Role-Attributed Transcription of Clinical Interviews via Failure-Mined Preference Optimization

The paper introduces DiaWhisper-DPO, an end‑to‑end model that fine‑tunes Whisper-large-v3 with LoRA and a frame‑level role head to transcribe and attribute utterances in clinical interviews. It further refines the system using failure‑mined preference optimization (DPO) that leverages genuine decoding failures as rejected completions, eliminating the need for human preference data. On the DAIC‑WOZ dataset, DiaWhisper‑DPO attains 0.973 role accuracy and 0.119 DER, outperforming cascaded baselines by 72% and dramatically reducing seed variation, while also improving performance on the cross‑lingual PDCH‑HAMD dataset.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

When Consistency Becomes Bias: Interviewer Effects in Semi-Structured Clinical Interviews

The paper examines automatic depression detection from doctor‑patient conversations and finds that models trained on semi‑structured interview data can achieve high accuracy by exploiting fixed interviewer prompts rather than the participants’ language. Across three datasets (ANDROIDS, DAIC‑WOZ, E‑DAIC), the authors show that restricting models to participant utterances distributes decision evidence more broadly and reflects genuine linguistic cues. The study highlights a cross‑dataset, architecture‑agnostic bias introduced by interviewer prompts and calls for analyses that localize decision evidence by time and speaker to ensure models learn from participants’ language.

By Hasindri Watawana, Sergio Burdisso, Diego A. Moreno-Galv\'an, Fernando S\'anchez-Vega, A. Pastor L\'opez-Monroy, Petr Motlicek, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Role-guided Speaker Deletion Verification in Clinical Psychiatry Speech Recordings with Audio Language Models

arXiv:2609.38491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical research in psychiatry increasingly relies on large scale collection of spoken language data to identify acoustic and linguistic biomarkers. Y...

By Joseph T Colonel, Daniel Katzman, Kelsey Kirker, Adam N Davidson, Shalaila S Haas, Cheryl Corcoran, Ren\'{e} S Kahn, Guillermo Checci, Baihan Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 1

No Detectable Change in Side-Level WER from Prompt-Level Context: A Preregistered Ablation on a Production Oral-History Corpus

The study examined whether providing full prompt-level context to a large multimodal model would improve speech transcription accuracy on a production oral‑history corpus. Using a preregistered within‑item paired ablation, the authors found that adding context did not produce a detectable change in side‑level word error rate (WER) for either gpt‑4o‑transcribe or gemini‑2.5‑flash. The results suggest that context alone may not be sufficient to enhance aggregate transcription accuracy, and that finer‑grained, sequence‑aligned metrics are needed to evaluate such mechanisms.

By Theodore O. Cochran, Stephanie Dodson, Keith Nore
arXiv AI
Aug 20

When Audio-Language Models Fail to Leverage Multimodal Context for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

The paper evaluates whether audio‑language models can use multimodal clinical context to improve dysarthric speech recognition. Using a benchmark built on the Speech Accessibility Project dataset, the authors test diagnosis labels, clinician ratings, and detailed clinical descriptions as prompts for nine models. They find that these prompts yield negligible or negative effects on word error rate, though fine‑tuning with LoRA and mixed prompt formats reduces WER by 52% and benefits certain subgroups such as Down syndrome and mild‑severity speakers.

By Pehu\'en Moure, Niclas Pokel, Bilal Bounajma, Yingqiang Gao, Roman Boehringer, Longbiao Cheng, Shih-Chii Liu