arXiv AI
Sep 2

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.

By Saman Rahbar, Xiliang Zhu, Irvin Cardoza, David Rossouw
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Listen to the Latents: Self-Correcting Speech Recognition in Large Audio Language Models Through Hidden-State Interactions

The paper introduces Hybrid Search, a method that refines warm-initialized large language model (LLM) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by exploiting interactions between ASR hidden states and the base LLM’s hidden states. By identifying tokens with high semantic dependence and selectively correcting them, the approach surpasses traditional global LLM‑correction techniques such as rescoring and late fusion. The study demonstrates that even after warm initialization, LLM‑based ASR models can further benefit from their base LLM during inference.

By Chan-Jan Hsu, Jaeyeon Kim, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, Carlos Busso
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