Jun Chen
Other people with similar names: Jun Chen
Unverified author pages with similar names: Jun Chen
2026
Listening Like Humans: Semantics-Guided Noise-Robust Multimodal Speech Recognition
Yan Fang | Jun Chen | Yian Yao | Shuxin Zhong | Min Sun | Kaishun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yan Fang | Jun Chen | Yian Yao | Shuxin Zhong | Min Sun | Kaishun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Severe acoustic degradation is often caused by overlapping noise, disfluencies, and environmental distortions. This phenomenon results in the dissolution of linguistic structures and the generation of unreliable ASR outputs. Inspired by human speech comprehension, we propose Speech-MLM, a novel multimodal framework that reframes ASR as semantics-guided speech reconstruction. This perspective introduces three core challenges: (C1) collapse of linguistic structure under acoustic degradation, (C2) semantic ambiguity under noise, and (C3) misalignment across modalities. To address these issues, we propose Speech-MLM, a multimodal ASR framework that integrates speech, spectrogram-derived visual cues, and textual variants to enhance robustness. It consists of: (i) Cognitive Structure Extractor that recovers prosodic structure from visualized acoustic features, (ii) Semantic Weaver that learns semantic equivalence across varied textual forms, and (iii) Retrieval-Guided Fusion Learner that unifies modalities within a shared semantic space. Experiments on multiple real-world noisy datasets demonstrate that Speech-MLM achieves an average 38.85% reduction in WER, while also attaining 98.71% BERTScore and 96.7% USE, over advanced baselines, demonstrating substantial gains in semantic robustness and generalization across domains.