StressTest: Can YOUR Speech LM Handle the Stress?

Understand

Sentence stress refers to emphasis on words within a spoken utterance to highlight or contrast an idea.

• It is often used to imply an underlying intention not explicitly stated.
• Recent speech-aware language models (SLMs) have enabled direct audio processing, allowing models to access the full richness of speech to perform audio reasoning tasks such as spoken question answering.
• Despite the crucial role of sentence stress in shaping meaning and intent, it remains largely overlooked in evaluation and development of SLMs.