DUAL: Textless Spoken Question Answering with Speech Discrete Unit Adaptive Learning

Anonymous

Abstract: Spoken Question Answering (SQA) has gained research attention and made remarkable progress in recent years. However, existing SQA methods rely on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcriptions, which is time and cost-prohibitive to collect. This work proposes an ASR transcription-free SQA framework named Discrete Unit Adaptive Learning (DUAL), which leverages unlabeled data for pre-training and is fine-tuned by the SQA downstream task. DAUL can directly predict the time interval of the spoken answer from the spoken document. We also release a new SQA benchmark corpus Natural Multi-speaker Spoken Question Answering (NMSQA) for testing SQA in realistic scenarios. The experimental results show that DUAL performs competitively with the cascade approach (ASR + text QA), and DUAL is robust to real-world speech. We will open-source our code and model to inspire more SQA innovations from the community.

Paper Type: long