LiveLongBench: Tackling Long-Context Understanding for Spoken Texts from Live Streams

Yongxuan Wu, Runyu Chen, Peiyu Liu, Hongjin Qian


Abstract
Long-context understanding poses significant challenges in natural language processing, particularly for real-world dialogues characterized by high redundancy and uneven information density. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive results on existing benchmarks, these datasets fail to reflect the complexities of such texts, limiting their applicability to practical scenarios. To bridge this gap, we construct the first spoken long-text dataset, derived from live streams, designed to reflect the redundancy-rich and conversational nature of real-world scenarios. We construct tasks in three categories: retrieval, reasoning, and hybrid tasks. We then evaluate both popular LLMs and specialized methods to assess their ability to understand long contexts in these tasks. Our results show that current methods exhibit strong task-specific preferences and perform poorly on highly redundant inputs, with no single method consistently outperforming others. We propose a new baseline that better handles redundancy in spoken text and achieves strong performance across tasks. Our findings highlight key limitations of current methods and suggest future directions for improving long-context understanding. Finally, our benchmark fills a gap in evaluating long-context spoken language understanding and provides a practical foundation for developing real-world e-commerce systems. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Yarayx/livelongbench.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1485
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
29713–29732
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1485/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yongxuan Wu, Runyu Chen, Peiyu Liu, and Hongjin Qian. 2026. LiveLongBench: Tackling Long-Context Understanding for Spoken Texts from Live Streams. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 29713–29732, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LiveLongBench: Tackling Long-Context Understanding for Spoken Texts from Live Streams (Wu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1485.pdf
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