@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-pardon,
title = "Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models",
author = "Huang, Shuanghong and
Xu, Jinlei and
Zhou, Youchao and
Zhou, Yanghao and
Zhao, Xuan and
Feng, Chong and
Zhang, Wenxuan",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.976/",
pages = "19528--19541",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance in spoken question answering (QA), with existing evaluations primarily focusing on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations. However, such evaluations implicitly assume that spoken inputs remain semantically answerable, an assumption that often fails in real-world interaction when essential information is missing. In this work, we introduce a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. We define answerability as a property of the input itself and construct paired evaluation conditions using a semantic-acoustic masking protocol. Based on this setting, we propose the Evaluability Awareness and Repair (EAR) score, a non-compensatory metric that jointly evaluates task competence under answerable conditions and repair behavior under unanswerable conditions. Experiments on two spoken QA benchmarks across diverse LALMs reveal a consistent gap between answer accuracy and conversational reliability: while many models perform well when inputs are answerable, most fail to recognize semantic unanswerability and initiate appropriate conversational repair. These findings expose a limitation of prevailing accuracy-centric evaluation practices and motivate reliability assessments that treat unanswerable inputs as cues for repair and continued interaction. The core code and dataset are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/sheunghung/EAR}."
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<abstract>Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance in spoken question answering (QA), with existing evaluations primarily focusing on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations. However, such evaluations implicitly assume that spoken inputs remain semantically answerable, an assumption that often fails in real-world interaction when essential information is missing. In this work, we introduce a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. We define answerability as a property of the input itself and construct paired evaluation conditions using a semantic-acoustic masking protocol. Based on this setting, we propose the Evaluability Awareness and Repair (EAR) score, a non-compensatory metric that jointly evaluates task competence under answerable conditions and repair behavior under unanswerable conditions. Experiments on two spoken QA benchmarks across diverse LALMs reveal a consistent gap between answer accuracy and conversational reliability: while many models perform well when inputs are answerable, most fail to recognize semantic unanswerability and initiate appropriate conversational repair. These findings expose a limitation of prevailing accuracy-centric evaluation practices and motivate reliability assessments that treat unanswerable inputs as cues for repair and continued interaction. The core code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/sheunghung/EAR.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models
%A Huang, Shuanghong
%A Xu, Jinlei
%A Zhou, Youchao
%A Zhou, Yanghao
%A Zhao, Xuan
%A Feng, Chong
%A Zhang, Wenxuan
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F huang-etal-2026-pardon
%X Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance in spoken question answering (QA), with existing evaluations primarily focusing on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations. However, such evaluations implicitly assume that spoken inputs remain semantically answerable, an assumption that often fails in real-world interaction when essential information is missing. In this work, we introduce a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. We define answerability as a property of the input itself and construct paired evaluation conditions using a semantic-acoustic masking protocol. Based on this setting, we propose the Evaluability Awareness and Repair (EAR) score, a non-compensatory metric that jointly evaluates task competence under answerable conditions and repair behavior under unanswerable conditions. Experiments on two spoken QA benchmarks across diverse LALMs reveal a consistent gap between answer accuracy and conversational reliability: while many models perform well when inputs are answerable, most fail to recognize semantic unanswerability and initiate appropriate conversational repair. These findings expose a limitation of prevailing accuracy-centric evaluation practices and motivate reliability assessments that treat unanswerable inputs as cues for repair and continued interaction. The core code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/sheunghung/EAR.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.976/
%P 19528-19541
Markdown (Informal)
[Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.976/) (Huang et al., Findings 2026)
ACL
- Shuanghong Huang, Jinlei Xu, Youchao Zhou, Yanghao Zhou, Xuan Zhao, Chong Feng, and Wenxuan Zhang. 2026. Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 19528–19541, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.