This paper explores a novel perspective to speech quality assessment by leveraging natural language descriptions, offering richer, more nuanced insights than traditional numerical scoring methods. Natural language feedback provides instructive recommendations and detailed evaluations, yet existing datasets lack the comprehensive annotations needed for this approach. To bridge this gap, we introduce QualiSpeech, a comprehensive low-level speech quality assessment dataset encompassing 11 key aspects and detailed natural language comments that include reasoning and contextual insights. Additionally, we propose the QualiSpeech Benchmark to evaluate the low-level speech understanding capabilities of auditory large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned auditory LLMs can reliably generate detailed descriptions of noise and distortion, effectively identifying their types and temporal characteristics. The results further highlight the potential for incorporating reasoning to enhance the accuracy and reliability of quality assessments. The dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tsinghua-ee/QualiSpeech.

Transformer-based models are widely used in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, and multimodal transformers have been effective in visual-language tasks. This study explores distilling visual information from pretrained multimodal transformers to pretrained language encoders. Our framework is inspired by cross-modal encoders’ success in visual-language tasks while we alter the learning objective to cater to the language-heavy characteristics of NLU. After training with a small number of extra adapting steps and finetuned, the proposed XDBERT (cross-modal distilled BERT) outperforms pretrained-BERT in general language understanding evaluation (GLUE), situations with adversarial generations (SWAG) benchmarks, and readability benchmarks. We analyze the performance of XDBERT on GLUE to show that the improvement is likely visually grounded.

This paper constructs a Chinese dialogue-based information-seeking question answering dataset CMDQA, which is mainly applied to the scenario of getting Chinese movie related information. It contains 10K QA dialogs (40K turns in total). All questions and background documents are compiled from the Wikipedia via an Internet crawler. The answers to the questions are obtained via extracting the corresponding answer spans within the related text passage. In CMDQA, in addition to searching related documents, pronouns are also added to the question to better mimic the real dialog scenario. This dataset can test the individual performance of the information retrieval, the question answering and the question re-writing modules. This paper also provides a baseline system and shows its performance on this dataset. The experiments elucidate that it still has a big gap to catch the human performance. This dataset thus provides enough challenge for the researcher to conduct related research.

This paper presents a framework to answer the questions that require various kinds of inference mechanisms (such as Extraction, Entailment-Judgement, and Summarization). Most of the previous approaches adopt a rigid framework which handles only one inference mechanism. Only a few of them adopt several answer generation modules for providing different mechanisms; however, they either lack an aggregation mechanism to merge the answers from various modules, or are too complicated to be implemented with neural networks. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework, which consists of a set of various answer generation modules, a dispatch module, and an aggregation module. The answer generation modules are designed to provide different inference mechanisms, the dispatch module is used to select a few appropriate answer generation modules to generate answer candidates, and the aggregation module is employed to select the final answer. We test our framework on the 2020 Formosa Grand Challenge Contest dataset. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Roberta-large model by about 11.4%.