arXiv Computation and Language

Negation Beyond the Verbal Channel: Temporal Multimodal Correlates in Dialogue

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Listen Before You Speak: Response Planning from Listener Facial Reactions for Conversational Speech Generation

The paper introduces ReACT‑TTS, a two‑stage framework that uses a one‑second sequence of listener facial reactions to plan the emotion and prosody of a conversational utterance before speech synthesis. Experiments on the MELD dataset show that temporally conditioned models outperform text‑only baselines in macro‑F1 and VAD concordance, while accuracy remains unchanged. A contextual‑appropriateness study with speech researchers indicates a strong preference for temporally conditioned responses, and the approach is integrated with a Grad‑TTS backbone for end‑to‑end speech generation.

By Yunji Chu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Omni Demand Understanding: A Benchmark for Contextual User-Intent Inference in Multimodal Interaction

The paper introduces Omni Demand Understanding (ODU), a benchmark designed to test whether multimodal models can infer a user's underlying demand from complex audio‑visual interactions. ODU requires models to detect the presence of a demand and infer intent using multimodal and conversational context, evaluated across single‑turn and multi‑turn scenarios. The authors built ODU‑Bench through a taxonomy‑guided approach, agentic video generation, and human‑recorded interactions, and found that even top models like Gemini 3.1 Pro recover only 44.7% of key information, with many models exhibiting high false‑trigger rates.

By Qi Chen, Yunfei Chu, Haolin He, Yifan Yang, Zihan Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Ziyang Ma, Ruiyang Xu, Meng Gao, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Hui Wang, Wen Huang, Yiheng Chen, Guanrou Yang, Qiuqiang Kong, Jin Xu, Xie Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

An automated pipeline for standardised speech-unit annotation in spontaneous dialogue

The paper introduces an automated pipeline that extracts conversational turns and backchannels from separate-channel recordings of spontaneous dyadic dialogue, combining voice activity detection, channel-energy filtering, temporal merging, automatic speech recognition, and context-based post‑processing. Evaluated on 99 ten‑minute Danish conversations, the system achieved F1 scores around 0.62 for both turns and backchannels, with median onset/offset errors of roughly 0.15–0.18 s. Performance was consistent across normal and asymmetric listening conditions, and a case study showed the pipeline’s outputs were less variable than human annotations, supporting its use as a reliable first‑pass annotation tool in semi‑automated workflows.

By Hanlu He, Harald Vilhelm Skat-R{\o}rdam, Ingvi \"Orn\'olfsson, Ivana Konvalinka
arXiv AI
5d ago

CLEAR: Coupling Local Evidence with Affective Representations for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

The paper introduces CLEAR, a framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation that couples contextual representations with local discriminative cues. It replaces emotion label generation with continuous internal representations from a vision‑language model and trains a classifier on these representations. Sample‑adaptive residual coupling is used to integrate textual and acoustic evidence from the target utterance into the contextual representation, improving emotion recognition performance on IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

By Linan Zhu, Zihao Zhai, Mengfei Xu, Xiao Han, Yuqian Fu, Xiangfan Chen, Zihang Zhang