TW-Sound580K: A Regional Audio-Text Dataset with Verification-Guided Curation for Localized Audio-Language Modeling

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Authors: Hao-Hui Xie, Ho-Lam Chung, Yi-Cheng Lin, Ke-Han Lu, Wenze Ren, Xie Chen, Hung-yi Lee
Cited by: 0
References: 11

Abstract

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) typically struggle with localized dialectal prosody due to the scarcity of specialized corpora. We present TW-Sound580K, a Taiwanese audio-text instruction dataset developed through a Verify-Generate-Critique (VGC) protocol. This pipeline leverages Dual-ASR validation to filter 522K raw clips, subsequently expanding them into 580,000 high-fidelity instruction pairs using a teacher model. The dataset's utility is demonstrated through Tai-LALM, which fine-tunes a DeSTA 2.5-Audio-initialized backbone and incorporates a dynamic Dual-ASR Arbitration strategy to optimize transcription selection during inference. On the TAU Benchmark, Tai-LALM reaches 49.1% accuracy, marking a 6.5% absolute improvement over the zero-shot baseline (42.6% with ASR text conditioning). This confirms that integrating regional corpora with rigorous curation and dynamic arbitration significantly enhances LALM performance on localized speech.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech Recognition and Synthesis Speech and dialogue systems Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
5 March 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint