Spoken Language Understanding

Also known as SLU

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Overview

Spoken Language Understanding studies how systems interpret what people say, from identifying intents and filling slots to tracking dialogue state, answering questions, and taking actions. Approaches include ASR pipelines paired with language models, end-to-end speech and audio language models, and structured methods that combine transcript, acoustic, and conversational evidence. Work also uses fine-tuning, synthetic data, and multilingual benchmarks to address low-resource languages, accents, noise, and varied speaking styles. A central challenge is making models reason reliably from speech itself: transcription errors and difficult acoustic conditions can undermine semantic decisions even when text-based performance is strong.

Latest papers

CardsList

41 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 64% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. StarDrinks: An English and Korean Test Set for SLU Evaluation in a Drink Ordering Scenario

    Apr 29, 2026Marcely Zanon Boito, Caroline Brun, Inyoung Kim +5Spoken Language UnderstandingConversational Agents

    NAVER LABS Europe

  2. Audio2Tool: Speak, Call, Act -- A Dataset for Benchmarking Speech Tool Use

    Apr 17, 2026Ramit Pahwa, Apoorva Beedu, Parivesh Priye +4Audio-Language Model EvaluationVoice Agent Evaluation

    Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies

  3. Raon-Speech Technical Report

    Apr 8, 2026Beomsoo Kim, Changho Choi, Dohyun Kim +23Speech Language ModelsSpeech Foundation Models

    KRAFTON

  4. Evaluating a Multi-Agent Voice-Enabled Smart Speaker for Care Homes: A Safety-Focused Framework

    Mar 24, 2026Zeinab Dehghani, Rameez Raja Kureshi, Koorosh Aslansefat +6Voice Agent EvaluationConversational Agents

    University of Hull, UK · University of Southampton, UK · Connexin, Hull, UK +1

  5. SLURP-TN : Resource for Tunisian Dialect Spoken Language Understanding

    Mar 23, 2026Haroun Elleuch, Salima Mdhaffar, Yannick Estève +1Spoken Language UnderstandingSpeech Processing

    ELYADATA, Paris, France · Laboratoire Informatique d’Avignon, Avignon Universite, Avignon, France

  6. TaigiSpeech: A Low-Resource Real-World Speech Intent Dataset and Preliminary Results with Scalable Data Mining In-the-Wild

    Mar 23, 2026Kai-Wei Chang, Yi-Cheng Lin, Huang-Cheng Chou +9Low-Resource Language ProcessingSpoken Language Understanding

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA · National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan · Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), University of Southern California, USA +3

  7. OSUM-Pangu: An Open-Source Multidimension Speech Understanding Foundation Model Built upon OpenPangu on Ascend NPUs

    Mar 11, 2026Yujie Liao, Xuelong Geng, Hongfei Xue +2Speech Foundation ModelsSpeech Language Models

  8. SCENEBench: An Audio Understanding Benchmark Grounded in Assistive and Industrial Use Cases

    Mar 10, 2026Laya Iyer, Angelina Wang, Sanmi KoyejoAudio UnderstandingAudio-Language Model Evaluation

    Stanford University · Cornell Tech

  9. Voice-Driven Semantic Perception for UAV-Assisted Emergency Networks

    Feb 19, 2026Nuno Saavedra, Pedro Ribeiro, André Coelho +1Spoken Language UnderstandingWireless Communications

    INESC TEC and Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Portugal

  10. Multi-Task Instruction Tuning via Data Scheduling for Low-Resource Arabic SpeechLLMs

    Jan 18, 2026Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar ChowdhurySpoken Language UnderstandingSpeech Processing

    Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar

  11. AzeroS: Extending LLM to Speech with Self-Generated Instruction-Free Tuning

    Dec 31, 2025Yiwen Shao, Wei Liu, Jiahong Li +4Speech Language ModelsSpoken Language Understanding

    Tencent AI Lab