Dial HEALTHDIAL for Advice: A Multilingual and Multi-Parallel Spoken Dialogue Dataset for Knowledge-Grounded Information Seeking
Authors: Songbo Hu, Yinhong Liu, Ej Zhou, Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Xiaobin Wang, Alexander Fraser, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen
Organizations: Language Technology Lab, University of Cambridge, UK · Independent Researcher · School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Abstract
Creating spoken dialogue datasets is methodologically challenging, and these challenges are amplified when the goal is to build multilingual, multi-parallel datasets at scale. This work introduces HEALTHDIAL, a large-scale, multilingual, and multi-parallel dataset for developing and evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based spoken dialogue systems. The dataset comprises 6,000 information-seeking dialogues (1,500 per language) grounded in trusted content from the World Health Organization (WHO) and 163 hours of user speech recorded from native speakers of diverse dialects across four official WHO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish. Each speaker is annotated with demographic (e.g., gender, age) and sociolinguistic (e.g., primary language, region of origin) variables. We report benchmark results across key dialogue tasks, which reveal consistent performance disparities across languages, even among high-resource ones. To support future research, we release the dataset, a prototype system, and a toolkit for data collection and system evaluation.
Most existing medical dialogue systems operate in a single-turn question--answering paradigm or rely on template-based datasets, limiting conversational realism and multilingual applicability. We introduce IndicMedDialog, a parallel multi-turn medical dialogue dataset spanning English and nine Indic languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. The dataset extends MDDial with LLM-generated synthetic consultations, translated using TranslateGemma, verified by native speakers, and refined through a script-aware post-processing pipeline to correct phonetic, lexical, and character-spacing errors. Building on this dataset, we fine-tune IndicMedLM via parameter-efficient adaptation of a quantized small language model, incorporating optional patient pre-context to personalise multi-turn symptom elicitation. We evaluate against zero-shot multilingual baselines, conduct systematic error analysis across ten languages, and validate clinical plausibility through medical expert evaluation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought huge improvements to Artificial Intelligence (AI), which can be applied to general-purpose tasks. However, their application to textual or spoken medical consultations is still an open research problem. This paper proposes MeDial-Speech, a novel speech dataset for training and evaluating Med-AIs that can carry out consultations with patients. It was collected in realistic environments from robot-patient and doctor-patient dialogues, contains 111+ hours of speech data (without data augmentation), and covers four health conditions: Lewy body dementia, heart failure, shoulder pain, and angina. In addition, we propose a dialogue benchmark via sentence selection (with 20 options) to evaluate three state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-5 mini, DeepSeek-V3, and Claude Sonnet 4. Experimental results reveal that Claude Sonnet 4 is the best in sentence selection, with 71.1% accuracy using manual transcriptions and 74.7% using automatic transcriptions, and that all LLMs are highly overconfident in their probabilistic predictions, regardless of selecting correct or incorrect sentences in medical dialogues. This dataset is free of charge for non-commercial purposes at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/hcuayahu/MeDial-Speech
We present DuplexDrama, the first synthesized spoken dialogue dataset that simultaneously covers four dimensions: (i) complete persona and scenario settings; (ii) three full-duplex behaviors (interruption, backchannel, incomplete); (iii) expressive speech with persona-aligned emotion labels; and (iv) script-aware sound events. DuplexDrama is built via a 4-stage pipeline; quality validation on both scripts and synthesized audio confirms its quality. We have produced more than 2,000 hours audio data with a 64-voice timbre pool spanning 13 personas and 5 age buckets; 3.8% of all turns carry at least one full-duplex behavior. This data has been validated through internal full-duplex model training. We will release a curated subset of 6,400 bilingual dialogues (800 h, Chinese ~500 h + English ~300 h) to advance full-duplex spoken dialogue model research. Data samples are available at our demo page and LLM-judge evaluation prompts will be released with the dataset.