arXiv Computation and Language

The Public Discourse Corpus (PDC): A Speaker-Attributed Dataset for Valence and Epistemic Modality with Target Speaker Participation

The Public Discourse Corpus (PDC) is the first dataset of public‑figure interview speech annotated for affective valence and epistemic modality. It contains 998 videos from 100 speakers across seven professional domains, yielding 186,642 sentences (3.1 million words). A key methodological contribution is Target Speaker Participation (TSP), a five‑category annotation taxonomy with documented inter‑annotator reliability (κ = 0.616), and an audio‑first diarization pipeline that separates target‑speaker turns from interviewer and third‑party speech. The corpus, annotation tools, validation sample, and processing pipeline are released as open source.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
arXiv AI
Sep 21

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

MENASpeechBank is a new reference voice bank that provides about 18,000 high‑quality utterances from 124 speakers across multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic, and regional Arabic varieties. The dataset is built through a controllable pipeline that creates persona profiles inspired by the World Values Survey, defines a taxonomy of roughly 5,000 conversational scenarios, matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, and generates around 417,000 role‑play conversations using an LLM. Synthetic speaker‑conditioned user‑turn audio is produced from reference recordings to maintain speaker diversity, and both synthetic and human‑recorded conversations are evaluated and analyzed for quality.

By Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam
arXiv AI
5d ago

To Trust or Not to Trust: Retrieval-Augmented Fact Checking in Speech

The paper introduces VeriSpeak, a benchmark of 3,879 spoken claims for evaluating fact verification in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). It shows a clear modality gap: models that verify written claims well often fail on spoken versions, and retrieval alone offers limited improvement. Combining retrieval with explicit reasoning yields the best performance, reaching 86.1% accuracy and demonstrating the need for grounded reasoning over retrieved evidence in speech misinformation detection.

By Debajyoti Mazumder, Mamta, Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri