arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Long Story Short: Story-level Video Understanding from 20K Short Films

The paper introduces Short‑Films 20K (SF20K), a large publicly available movie dataset comprising 20,143 amateur films totaling 3,582 hours, with an average length of 12 minutes per film. Accompanying the dataset is SF20K‑Test, a manual open‑ended question‑answering benchmark featuring 95 movies and 979 question‑answer pairs. Analysis of the benchmark shows limited data leakage, highlights the necessity of long‑term reasoning, and demonstrates that instruction tuning on the large‑scale dataset significantly boosts vision‑language model performance.

By Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton, Ivan Laptev
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Enabling Streaming User Transcription in Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Models

The paper introduces a lightweight ASR head that can be added to full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models, enabling real‑time user transcription without major architectural changes. The method adds only a few parameters and preserves full‑duplex conversational features such as turn‑taking and barge‑in. Experiments show a streaming WER of 10.21% within the duplex framework and 7.73% when trained as a standalone ASR model, matching state‑of‑the‑art performance.

By Ke Hu, Nourchene Ferchichi, Edresson Casanova, Ankita Pasad, Elena Rastorgueva, Chen Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Piotr Zelasko, Yifan Peng, Hainan Xu, Zhehuai Chen, Boris Ginsburg
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Whisper-Based Speech Transcription from Videos Across Multiple Languages for Cross-Cultural Understanding

The paper introduces methods to improve speech recognition for multilingual video transcription using Whisper-based tools, targeting cross‑cultural understanding. It reports an average transcription error rate of 30% across seven languages, which can be lowered to 20% with modest fine‑tuning. The authors also release associated speech and metadata to aid community refinement of these techniques.

By Michael Picheny
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR Technical Report

The Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR Technical Report introduces a Mixture-of-Experts large language model-based automatic speech recognition system that addresses real‑world production challenges such as regional dialects, dynamic entities, hotwords, long‑range context, and disfluent speech. Built on the Qwen backbone and trained on tens of millions of hours of speech data, it supports transcription in 30 languages and 16 Chinese dialects, and offers industry‑domain entity recognition, hierarchical hotword customization, single‑pass polishing, and long‑audio contextual modeling. A streaming variant, Qwen-Audio-3.0-ASR-Streaming, is also presented for low‑latency applications, with evaluations showing state‑of‑the‑art performance against leading commercial systems.

By Chuanmeng Bian, Daren Chen, Peixin Chen, Zhigao Chen, Zhiyun Fan, Zhifu Gao, Bo Gong, Qing Gu, Jiajun He, Yawei Hu, Yunjie Ji, Jingbei Li, Xiangang Li, Xu Li, Zengxi Li, Zheng Li, Chengdong Liang, Baiji Liu, Ying Liu, Bin Ma, Yiping Peng, Yuezhang Peng, Zhendong Peng, Yu Pu, Yang Shi, Xin Shu, Jian Tang, Biao Tian, Peiyao Wang, Tianzi Wang, Wen Wang, Wupeng Wang, Cheng Wen, Yuzhong Wu, Zijian Xia, Yunchong Xiao, Nan Yang, Jianwei Yu, Jixing Yu, Binbin Zhang, Lei Zhang, Sitong Zhao, Guangdong Zhou, Yuan Zhou, Jianheng Zhuo