English

Approaching Dialogue State Tracking via Aligning Speech Encoders and LLMs

Audio and Speech Processing 2025-06-11 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

In this work, we approach spoken Dialogue State Tracking (DST) by bridging the representation spaces of speech encoders and LLMs via a small connector module, with a focus on fully open-sourced and open-data components (WavLM-large, OLMo). We focus on ablating different aspects of such systems including full/LoRA adapter fine-tuning, the effect of agent turns in the dialogue history, as well as fuzzy matching-based output post-processing, which greatly improves performance of our systems on named entities in the dialogue slot values. We conduct our experiments on the SpokenWOZ dataset, and additionally utilize the Speech-Aware MultiWOZ dataset to augment our training data. Ultimately, our best-performing WavLM + connector + OLMo-1B aligned models achieve state of the art on the SpokenWOZ test set (34.66% JGA), and our system with Gemma-2-9B-instruct further surpasses this result, reaching 42.17% JGA on SpokenWOZ test.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.08633,
  title  = {Approaching Dialogue State Tracking via Aligning Speech Encoders and LLMs},
  author = {Šimon Sedláček and Bolaji Yusuf and Ján Švec and Pradyoth Hegde and Santosh Kesiraju and Oldřich Plchot and Jan Černocký},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08633},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to Interspeech 2025