Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI

Yuya Asano, Sabit Hassan, Paras Sharma, Anthony B. Sicilia, Katherine Atwell, Diane Litman, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
General-purpose automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not always perform well in goal-oriented dialogue. Existing ASR correction methods rely on prior user data or named entities. We extend correction to tasks that have no prior user data and exhibit linguistic flexibility such as lexical and syntactic variations. We propose a novel context augmentation with a large language model and a ranking strategy that incorporates contextual information from the dialogue states of a goal-oriented conversational AI and its tasks. Our method ranks (1) n-best ASR hypotheses by their lexical and semantic similarity with context and (2) context by phonetic correspondence with ASR hypotheses. Evaluated in home improvement and cooking domains with real-world users, our method improves recall and F1 of correction by 34% and 16%, respectively, while maintaining precision and false positive rate. Users rated .8-1 point (out of 5) higher when our correction method worked properly, with no decrease due to false positives.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-industry.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Kareem Darwish, Apoorv Agarwal
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
374–386
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.32/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuya Asano, Sabit Hassan, Paras Sharma, Anthony B. Sicilia, Katherine Atwell, Diane Litman, and Malihe Alikhani. 2025. Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track, pages 374–386, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI (Asano et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.32.pdf