Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.
The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
By Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, JK Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla
arXiv:2607. 11053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fruitful collaborations rely on cooperative communications, including of contextual cues to incorporate into reasoning.
By Hannah VanderHoeven, Abhijnan Nath, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
arXiv:2606. 01845v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable progress in pragmatic language understanding, prior research has focused mainly on their comprehension of verbal behavior.
By Sugyeong Eo, Heuiseok Lim
Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.