LLMs and speech assistants are increasingly used for task-oriented interactions, yet their evaluation often relies on controlled scenarios that fail to capture the variability and complexity of real user requests. Drink ordering, for example, involves diverse named entities, drink types, sizes, customizations, and brand-specific terminology, as well as spontaneous speech phenomena such as hesitations and self-corrections. To address this gap, we introduce StarDrinks, a test set in English and Korean containing speech utterances features, transcriptions, and annotated slots. Our dataset supports speech-to-slots SLU, transcription-to-slots NLU, and speech-to-transcription ASR evaluation, providing a realistic benchmark for model robustness and generalization in a linguistically rich, real-world task.

We study the zero-shot setting for the aspect-based scientific document summarization task. Summarizing scientific documents with respect to an aspect can remarkably improve document assistance systems and readers experience. However, existing large-scale datasets contain a limited variety of aspects, causing summarization models to over-fit to a small set of aspects and a specific domain. We establish baseline results in zero-shot performance (over unseen aspects and the presence of domain shift), paraphrasing, leave-one-out, and limited supervised samples experimental setups. We propose a self-supervised pre-training approach to enhance the zero-shot performance. We leverage the PubMed structured abstracts to create a biomedical aspect-based summarization dataset. Experimental results on the PubMed and FacetSum aspect-based datasets show promising performance when the model is pre-trained using unlabelled in-domain data.

In this paper we present a prototype demonstrator showcasing a novel method to perform semantic exploration of user reviews. The system enables effective navigation in a rich contextual semantic schema with a large number of structured classes indicating relevant information. In order to identify instances of the structured classes in the reviews, we defined a new Information Extraction task called Semantic Context Path (SCP) labeling, which simultaneously assigns types and semantic roles to entity mentions. Reviews can rapidly be explored based on the fine-grained and structured semantic classes. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented this system for reviews on Points-of-Interest, in English and Korean.