Reading Between the Waves: Robust Topic Segmentation Using Inter-Sentence Audio Features

Spoken content, such as online videos and podcasts, often spans multiple topics, which makes automatic topic segmentation essential for user navigation and downstream applications. However, current methods do not fully leverage acoustic features, leaving room for improvement. We propose a multi-modal approach that fine-tunes both a text encoder and a Siamese audio encoder, capturing acoustic cues around sentence boundaries. Experiments on a large-scale dataset of YouTube videos show substantial gains over text-only and multi-modal baselines. Our model also proves more resilient to ASR noise and outperforms a larger text-only baseline on three additional datasets in Portuguese, German, and English, underscoring the value of learned acoustic features for robust topic segmentation.

Towards Multi-Level Transcript Segmentation: LoRA Fine-Tuning for Table-of-Contents Generation

Segmenting speech transcripts into thematic sections benefits both downstream processing and users who depend on written text for accessibility. We introduce a novel approach to hierarchical topic segmentation in transcripts, generating multi-level tables of contents that capture both topic and subtopic boundaries. We compare zero-shot prompting and LoRA fine-tuning on large language models, while also exploring the integration of high-level speech pause features. Evaluations on English meeting recordings and multilingual lecture transcripts (Portuguese, German) show significant improvements over established topic segmentation baselines. Additionally, we adapt a common evaluation measure for multi-level segmentation, taking into account all hierarchical levels within one metric.

Generalizing to Unseen Disaster Events: A Causal View

Due to the rapid growth of social media platforms, these tools have become essential for monitoring information during ongoing disaster events. However, extracting valuable insights requires real-time processing of vast amounts of data. A major challenge in existing systems is their exposure to event-related biases, which negatively affects their ability to generalize to emerging events. While recent advancements in debiasing and causal learning offer promising solutions, they remain underexplored in the disaster event domain. In this work, we approach bias mitigation through a causal lens and propose a method to reduce event- and domain-related biases, enhancing generalization to future events. Our approach outperforms multiple baselines by up to +1.9% F1 and significantly improves a PLM-based classifier across three disaster classification tasks.