Temporally Aligning Long Audio Interviews with Questions: A Case Study in Multimodal Data Integration

TL;DR

This paper introduces INDENT, a cross-attention-based framework for aligning long audio interviews with questions, improving retrieval accuracy in multilingual, noisy, real-world survey recordings without requiring verbatim text matches.

Contribution

The work presents a novel cross-attention model that leverages temporal sentence order and semantic embeddings to align questions with long audio recordings in multiple languages.

Findings

Significant improvement in retrieval accuracy (about 3% R-avg) over text heuristics.

Effective use of noisy ASR outputs for better alignment.

Model trained on Hindi generalizes to 11 Indic languages.

Abstract

The problem of audio-to-text alignment has seen significant amount of research using complete supervision during training. However, this is typically not in the context of long audio recordings wherein the text being queried does not appear verbatim within the audio file. This work is a collaboration with a non-governmental organization called CARE India that collects long audio health surveys from young mothers residing in rural parts of Bihar, India. Given a question drawn from a questionnaire that is used to guide these surveys, we aim to locate where the question is asked within a long audio recording. This is of great value to African and Asian organizations that would otherwise have to painstakingly go through long and noisy audio recordings to locate questions (and answers) of interest. Our proposed framework, INDENT, uses a cross-attention-based model and prior information on the temporal ordering of sentences to learn speech embeddings that capture the semantics of the underlying spoken text. These learnt embeddings are used to retrieve the corresponding audio segment based on text queries at inference time. We empirically demonstrate the significant effectiveness (improvement in R-avg of about 3%) of our model over those obtained using text-based heuristics. We also show how noisy ASR, generated using state-of-the-art ASR models for Indian languages, yields better results when used in place of speech. INDENT, trained only on Hindi data is able to cater to all languages supported by the (semantically) shared text space. We illustrate this empirically on 11 Indic languages.