A Shaky Voice Is Not Always a Dodge: Benchmarking Textual and Vocal Evasion Detection in Earnings Calls

Mirae Kim, Seonghun Jeong, Youngjun Kwak


Abstract
Existing approaches to evasion detection in earnings calls focus on textual transcripts, treating evasion as a single-dimensional phenomenon. We argue that evasion in spoken communication is inherently multidimensional: beyond what executives say, how they say it carries independent and complementary information. To study these dimensions jointly, we introduce DualEvasion, a benchmark for evasion detection across text and audio in earnings call Q A. The benchmark contains 505 annotated question-answer pairs from 60 earnings calls, each with two independent labels: textual evasion (direct vs. evasive) and vocal cues operationalized as speaker confidence (confident vs. unconfident). Our experiments show that state-of-the-art multimodal models struggle to detect vocal confidence, particularly on unconfident responses. Our analysis suggests these models interpret acoustic cues in isolation rather than relative to each speaker’s baseline. Providing speaker-level references yields modest improvements, but a substantial gap with human performance remains.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1056
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
22366–22377
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1056/
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Cite (ACL):
Mirae Kim, Seonghun Jeong, and Youngjun Kwak. 2026. A Shaky Voice Is Not Always a Dodge: Benchmarking Textual and Vocal Evasion Detection in Earnings Calls. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 22366–22377, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Shaky Voice Is Not Always a Dodge: Benchmarking Textual and Vocal Evasion Detection in Earnings Calls (Kim et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1056.pdf