Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission55 Authors

Keywords: contrastive language-speech pre-training, speech-text representation learning, multi-granular representation learning, style-captioned speech datasets

Abstract: Modeling fine-grained speaking styles remains challenging for language-speech representation pre-training, as existing speech-text models are typically trained with coarse captions or task-specific supervision, and scalable fine-grained style annotations are unavailable. We present FCaps, a large-scale dataset with fine-grained free-text style descriptions, encompassing 47k hours of speech and 19M fine-grained captions annotated via a novel end-to-end pipeline that directly grounds detailed captions in audio, thereby avoiding the error propagation caused by LLM-based rewriting in existing cascaded pipelines. Evaluations using LLM-as-a-judge demonstrate that our annotations surpass existing cascaded annotations in terms of correctness, coverage, and naturalness. Building on FCaps, we propose CLSP, a contrastive language-speech pre-trained model that integrates global and fine-grained supervision, enabling unified representations across multiple granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLSP learns fine-grained and multi-granular speech-text representations that perform reliably across global and fine-grained speech-text retrieval, zero-shot paralinguistic classification, and speech style similarity scoring, with strong alignment to human judgments. All resources will be made publicly available.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Speech Processing and Spoken Language Understanding

Research Area Keywords: speech technologies, multimodality, evaluation and metrics, NLP datasets

Contribution Types: Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 55