Challenge: Existing systems that pretrain word and sentence embeddings to account for nearby linguistic context are unclear how to integrate extra-linguistic context into NLU.
Approach: They perform a corpus analysis to develop a representation of the knowledge and reasoning used to interpret indirect speech acts.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on the domain-general patterns of reasoning involved and implements Answer Set programming.

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Developing a Corpus of Indirect Speech Act Schemas (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Indirect speech acts (ISAs) involve utterances whose literal meanings are not identical to their intended meanings.
Approach: They propose a formal representation of ISA Schemas required for such testing, including a measure of the difficulty of a particular schema.
Outcome: The proposed model minimizes the amount of expert authoring needed and maximizes realism.
Read the Room, Read the Image: Understanding Indirect Speech Acts in Multimodal Visual Contexts (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on explicit context, but do not address context-dependent pragmatic understanding.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for evaluating ISA understanding through integrated reasoning over visual context and dialogue.
Outcome: Experiments show that state-of-the-art models struggle with visually grounded indirect speech acts . linguistic meaning emerges through the relationship between an utterance and situational context .
DIRECT: Direct and Indirect Responses in Conversational Text Corpus (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Neural conversation models have been able to generate fluent responses through training on a dialogue corpus, but they lack the ability to reveal the implied intentions of users.
Approach: They propose to train neural conversation models on a dialogue corpus that provides pragmatic paraphrases to advance techniques for natural language understanding in dialogue systems.
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Discourse on ASR Measurement: Introducing the ARPOCA Assessment Tool (2022.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Automated speech recognition (ASR) models are based on a corpus of audio recordings, but are often small or nonexistent for less common languages and dialects.
Approach: This research proposal will develop a semi-automatic acoustic features extraction system that integrates phonetic transcripts with pronunciation dictionaries.
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Can Input Attributions Explain Inductive Reasoning in In-Context Learning? (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: interpreting the internal process of neural models has long been a challenge . despite rapid progress, there are still questions bridging the IA and MI eras .
Approach: They propose to use input attribution methods to interpret in-context learning . they find that a certain simple IA method works best in large models .
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Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio–Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent multimodal models are trained on large collections of audio-text pairs using contrastive learning or nexttoken prediction objectives.
Approach: They evaluate audio language models across five semantic and paralinguistic reasoning tasks: entailment, consistency, plausibility, accent drift, and accent restraint.
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Speech Translation and the End-to-End Promise: Taking Stock of Where We Are (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Until recently, the only feasible approach to translating acoustic speech signals into text was the cascaded approach.
Approach: They propose a classification of the main challenges of traditional approaches to speech translation . they argue that end-to-end models fall short due to compromises made to address data scarcity .
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Unveiling the Limits of Large Language Models in Inferring Pragmatic Meaning from Non-Verbal Responses (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused mainly on LLMs' comprehension of verbal behavior, with non-verbal behavior considered only in conjunction with verbal responses.
Approach: They present the first systematic evaluation of LLMs’ ability to infer pragmatic meaning in dialogue consisting solely of non-verbal responses.
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Speech Recognition and Meaning Interpretation: Towards Disambiguation of Structurally Ambiguous Spoken Utterances in Indonesian (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Ambiguity is one of the challenges in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose to resolve structurally ambiguous sentences into unambiguous texts in Indonesian using prosodic information.
Outcome: The proposed system achieves a disambiguation accuracy of 79.6% while the proposed direct system yields an even more impressive disambiguations accuracy of 82%.
Causal Inference of Script Knowledge (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Prior work on script induction relied on correlation between instances of events in corpus . instead, we propose an approach based on causal effects between events .
Approach: They propose to use causal effects to induce scripts from text . they propose to compute a function that matches the intuition of what a script represents .
Outcome: The proposed method matches the intuition of what a script represents, the authors show .

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