cs.CLJun 11, 2026

PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue

Authors: Wen ZhangXiaocui YangZhuoyue GaoShi FengDaling WangYifei Zhang

Organizations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China

Abstract

Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a prosody-to-language translation mechanism to stabilize large language model reasoning and enables on-demand invocation of external knowledge tools for empathetic dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PRISM achieves consistent improvements in empathy, prosodic appropriateness, and text response generation quality across objective and subjective metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Bxzfrm/PRISM.

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