SEA-SpeechBench: A Large-Scale Multitask Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across Southeast Asia

2026-09-08

AI Summary

为解决东南亚语言在语音理解评估中的不足，通过SEA-SpeechBench基准，使用97,194个样本和597小时音频数据进行多任务评估。

Abstract

The rapid advancement of audio and multimodal large language models has unlocked transformative speech understanding capabilities, yet evaluation frameworks remain predominantly English-centric, leaving Southeast Asian (SEA) languages critically underrepresented. We introduce SEA-SpeechBench, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale multitask benchmark that evaluates speech understanding in 11 SEA languages through 97,194 samples across 99 evaluation sets and 597 hours of curated audio data. Our benchmark comprises 9 diverse tasks across 3 categories: speech processing (automatic speech recognition, speech translation, spoken question answering), paralinguistic analysis (emotion, gender, age, speaker recognition), and temporal understanding, a novel dimension featuring timestamped content queries and temporal localization within extended audio sequences up to 3 minutes. We implement multilingual prompting in both native SEA languages and English to reflect user interactions with audio-language models. Evaluation of leading open-source and proprietary systems reveals marked performance gaps. Across all models, performance remains underwhelming on temporal understanding, emotion recognition, and speech translation. Prompting in low-resource languages such as Burmese and Tamil lags behind English by up to 41 percentage points. Our findings expose critical model limitations and underscore the need for inclusive model development. The SEA-SpeechBench benchmark is available at https://zwenyu.github.io/SEA-SpeechBench/.

Problem

• Speech Understanding
• Southeast Asian Languages
• Evaluation Frameworks
• Multitask Benchmark

Innovation

• multitask benchmark
• speech understanding
• Southeast Asian languages
• temporal understanding
• multilingual prompting