CORAAL QA: A Dataset and Framework for Open Domain Spontaneous Speech Question Answering from Long Audio Files

This paper presents a novel dataset (CORAAL QA) and framework for audio question-answering from long audio recordings containing spontaneous speech. The dataset introduced here provides sets of questions that can be factually answered from short spans of a long audio files (typically 30min to 1hr) from the Corpus of Regional African American Language. Using this dataset, we divide the audio recordings into 60 second segments, automatically transcribe each segment, and use PLDA scoring of BERT-based semantic embeddings to rank the relevance of ASR transcript segments in answering the target question. In order to improve this framework through data augmentation, we use large language models including ChatGPT and Llama 2 to automatically generate further training examples and show how prompt engineering can be optimized for this process. By creatively leveraging knowledge from large-language models, we achieve state-of-the-art question-answering performance in this information retrieval task.