Reference-Based Prosody and Rhythm Evaluation for Spoken Dialogue Systems

arXiv:2606.31055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-to-speech (S2S) AI agents are advancing rapidly, yet evaluation lacks interpretable speech-native measures for conversational prosody and rhythm. Because F_0, speaking rate, articulation rate, and pausing shift with model-predicted speaker traits and interaction state, pooled human statistics can be poorly calibrated for evaluating a particular output. Using 4000+ hours of dyadic English conversation from the Seamless Interaction dataset, we construct matched reference regimes for F_0 mean, F_0 expressivity, speech rate, articulation rate, pause ratio, and mean pause duration. We then define a percentile-based evaluation protocol: extract the same metrics from an S2S output waveform, compare them to the closest matched human reference stratum, and report percentile deviations or 5th-95th percentile out-of-regime flags. On held-out human rows, pooled references over-flag state-conditioned F_0 expressivity and rhythm, while matched references return flag rates closer to the nominal 10% and make deviation direction interpretable. These outputs serve as behavioral plausibility checks that complement, rather than replace, perceptual and user-centered evaluation.

Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-07-01