Tara Bogavelli
Author directory2026
EVA-Bench: A New End-to-end Framework for Evaluating Voice Agents
Tara Bogavelli | Gabrielle Gauthier Melancon | Katrina Stankiewicz | Oluwanifemi Bamgbose | Fanny Riols | Hoang H Nguyen | Raghav Mehndiratta | Lindsay Devon Brin | Hari Subramani | Joseph Marinier | Sridhar Krishna Nemala | Anil Madamala | Srinivas Sunkara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Tara Bogavelli | Gabrielle Gauthier Melancon | Katrina Stankiewicz | Oluwanifemi Bamgbose | Fanny Riols | Hoang H Nguyen | Raghav Mehndiratta | Lindsay Devon Brin | Hari Subramani | Joseph Marinier | Sridhar Krishna Nemala | Anil Madamala | Srinivas Sunkara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Voice agents are increasingly deployed across enterprise applications. However, no existing benchmark jointly addresses realistic conversation simulation and comprehensive voice-specific evaluation. We present EVA-Bench, an end-to-end evaluation framework that addresses both. On the simulation side, EVA-Bench orchestrates dynamic bot-to-bot audio conversations with automatic simulation validation that detects user simulator error and appropriately regenerates conversations before scoring. On the measurement side, EVA-Bench introduces two composite metrics: EVA-A (Accuracy) and EVA-X (Experience). EVA-Bench includes 213 scenarios across three enterprise domains, a controlled perturbation suite for accent and noise robustness, and multi-trial measurements that distinguish peak from reliable capability. Across 12 systems spanning three architectures, we find: (1) no system simultaneously exceeds 0.5 on both EVA-A pass@1 and EVA-X pass@1; (2) peak and reliable performance diverge substantially (median pass@k - pass^k gap of 0.44 on EVA-A; and (3) accent and noise perturbations expose substantial robustness gaps, with effects varying across architectures, systems, and metrics (mean Δ up to 0.314). We release EVA-Bench under an open-source license.
Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated TTS Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions
Oluwanifemi Bamgbose | Jash Shah | Simon Rosen | Lindsay Devon Brin | Hoang H Nguyen | Anke Koelzer | Rachel Hansen | Tara Bogavelli | Fanny Riols
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Oluwanifemi Bamgbose | Jash Shah | Simon Rosen | Lindsay Devon Brin | Hoang H Nguyen | Anke Koelzer | Rachel Hansen | Tara Bogavelli | Fanny Riols
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio-LLM Judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive. We deconstruct the under-specified "naturalness" into a linguistically grounded annotation schema spanning 10 distinct perceptual dimensions, and use it to construct the first dimension-level meta-evaluation benchmark for TTS, comprising 860 utterances annotated by trained linguist raters (Krippendorff’s up to 0.821). Results from benchmarking four MOS predictors and four Audio-LLM Judges reveals that MOS predictors collapse onto acoustic signal quality, while Audio-LLM Judges show selective, prompt-dependent detection that doesnt generalise across the dimension set. Neither class reliably captures linguistically structured speech errors. Our dataset, annotation schema, and evaluation code are publicly released to support more targeted and interpretable TTS evaluation.
AgentArch: A Benchmark for Evaluating Agent Architectures in Enterprise Workflows
Tara Bogavelli | Hari Subramani | Roshnee Sharma
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tara Bogavelli | Hari Subramani | Roshnee Sharma
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While individual components of agentic architectures have been studied in isolation, we lack empirical evidence on how design dimensions interact in realistic multi-agent systems. This study aims to address these gaps by providing a comprehensive enterprise-specific benchmark. We introduce AgentArch: a benchmark that evaluates 18 agentic configurations across state-of-the-art large language models. The study spans four dimensions: orchestration strategy, agent style (ReAct versus function calling), memory architecture, and thinking tool integration. Results reveal strong model-specific architectural preferences that challenge one-size-fits-all assumptions in agentic AI. They also expose notable performance gaps on enterprise tasks: the best models reach only 35.3% success on the complex task and 70.8% on the simpler task. We aim to inform architecting choices for enterprise agents by grounding model selection and component design in systematic evidence.