@inproceedings{manakul-etal-2026-audiojudge,
title = "{A}udio{J}udge: Understanding What Works in Large Audio Model Based Speech Evaluation",
author = "Manakul, Potsawee and
Gan, Woody Haosheng and
Ryan, Michael J and
Khan, Ali Sartaz and
Sirichotedumrong, Warit and
Pipatanakul, Kunat and
Held, William Barr and
Yang, Diyi",
editor = "Demberg, Vera and
Inui, Kentaro and
Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.168/",
pages = "3644--3663",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-380-7",
abstract = "Current speech evaluation suffers from two critical limitations: the need and difficulty of designing specialized systems targeting individual audio characteristics, and poor correlation between automatic evaluation methods and human preferences. This work presents a systematic study of Large Audio Model (LAM) as a Judge, AudioJudge, investigating whether it can provide a unified evaluation framework that addresses both challenges. We systematically explore AudioJudge across audio characteristic detection tasks, including pronunciation, speaking rate, speaker identification and speech quality, and system-level human preference simulation for automated benchmarking. We investigate different prompt engineering strategies, finding that audio concatenation combined with in-context learning significantly improves performance across both audio characteristic detection and human preference simulation tasks. We further introduce a multi-aspect ensemble AudioJudge to enable general-purpose multi-aspect audio evaluation. This method decomposes speech assessment into specialized judges for lexical content, speech quality, and paralinguistic features, achieving up to 0.91 Spearman correlation with human preferences on our system ranking benchmark. Robustness analysis reveals that while LAMs maintain strong performance under acoustic noise, they exhibit significant verbosity and positional biases that require careful mitigation."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="manakul-etal-2026-audiojudge">
<titleInfo>
<title>AudioJudge: Understanding What Works in Large Audio Model Based Speech Evaluation</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Potsawee</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Manakul</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Woody</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Haosheng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Michael</namePart>
<namePart type="given">J</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ryan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ali</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Sartaz</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Khan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Warit</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Sirichotedumrong</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kunat</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pipatanakul</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">William</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Barr</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Held</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Diyi</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2026-03</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Vera</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Demberg</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Kentaro</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Inui</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Lluís</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Marquez</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Rabat, Morocco</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-380-7</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Current speech evaluation suffers from two critical limitations: the need and difficulty of designing specialized systems targeting individual audio characteristics, and poor correlation between automatic evaluation methods and human preferences. This work presents a systematic study of Large Audio Model (LAM) as a Judge, AudioJudge, investigating whether it can provide a unified evaluation framework that addresses both challenges. We systematically explore AudioJudge across audio characteristic detection tasks, including pronunciation, speaking rate, speaker identification and speech quality, and system-level human preference simulation for automated benchmarking. We investigate different prompt engineering strategies, finding that audio concatenation combined with in-context learning significantly improves performance across both audio characteristic detection and human preference simulation tasks. We further introduce a multi-aspect ensemble AudioJudge to enable general-purpose multi-aspect audio evaluation. This method decomposes speech assessment into specialized judges for lexical content, speech quality, and paralinguistic features, achieving up to 0.91 Spearman correlation with human preferences on our system ranking benchmark. Robustness analysis reveals that while LAMs maintain strong performance under acoustic noise, they exhibit significant verbosity and positional biases that require careful mitigation.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">manakul-etal-2026-audiojudge</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.168/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2026-03</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>3644</start>
<end>3663</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T AudioJudge: Understanding What Works in Large Audio Model Based Speech Evaluation
%A Manakul, Potsawee
%A Gan, Woody Haosheng
%A Ryan, Michael J.
%A Khan, Ali Sartaz
%A Sirichotedumrong, Warit
%A Pipatanakul, Kunat
%A Held, William Barr
%A Yang, Diyi
%Y Demberg, Vera
%Y Inui, Kentaro
%Y Marquez, Lluís
%S Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 March
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Rabat, Morocco
%@ 979-8-89176-380-7
%F manakul-etal-2026-audiojudge
%X Current speech evaluation suffers from two critical limitations: the need and difficulty of designing specialized systems targeting individual audio characteristics, and poor correlation between automatic evaluation methods and human preferences. This work presents a systematic study of Large Audio Model (LAM) as a Judge, AudioJudge, investigating whether it can provide a unified evaluation framework that addresses both challenges. We systematically explore AudioJudge across audio characteristic detection tasks, including pronunciation, speaking rate, speaker identification and speech quality, and system-level human preference simulation for automated benchmarking. We investigate different prompt engineering strategies, finding that audio concatenation combined with in-context learning significantly improves performance across both audio characteristic detection and human preference simulation tasks. We further introduce a multi-aspect ensemble AudioJudge to enable general-purpose multi-aspect audio evaluation. This method decomposes speech assessment into specialized judges for lexical content, speech quality, and paralinguistic features, achieving up to 0.91 Spearman correlation with human preferences on our system ranking benchmark. Robustness analysis reveals that while LAMs maintain strong performance under acoustic noise, they exhibit significant verbosity and positional biases that require careful mitigation.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.168/
%P 3644-3663
Markdown (Informal)
[AudioJudge: Understanding What Works in Large Audio Model Based Speech Evaluation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.168/) (Manakul et al., EACL 2026)
ACL
- Potsawee Manakul, Woody Haosheng Gan, Michael J Ryan, Ali Sartaz Khan, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Kunat Pipatanakul, William Barr Held, and Diyi Yang. 2026. AudioJudge: Understanding What Works in Large Audio Model Based Speech Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3644–3663, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.