@inproceedings{li-wu-2026-semi,
    title = "Semi-Supervised Diseased Detection from Speech Dialogues with Multi-Level Data Modeling",
    author = "Li, Xingyuan  and
      Wu, Mengyue",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1194/",
    pages = "23851--23862",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Detecting medical conditions from speech acoustics is fundamentally a weakly-supervised learning problem: a single, often noisy, session-level label must be linked to nuanced patterns within a long, complex audio recording. This task is further hampered by severe data scarcity and the subjective nature of clinical annotations. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a viable path to leverage unlabeled data, existingaudio methods often fail to address the core challenge that pathological traits are not uniformly expressed in a patient{'}s speech. We propose a novel, audio-only SSL framework that explicitly models this hierarchy by jointly learning from frame-level, segment-level, and session-level representations within unsegmented clinical dialogues. Our end-to-end approach dynamically aggregates these multi-granularity features and generates high-quality pseudo-labels to efficiently utilize unlabeled data. Extensive experiments show the framework is model-agnostic, robust across languages and conditions, and highly data-efficient{---}achieving, for instance, 90{\%} of fully-supervised performance using only 11 labeled samples. This work provides a principled approach to learning from weak, far-end supervision in medical speech analysis.The code is available at https://github.com/fispresent/semi{\_}pathological."
}