CASA: Content-Acoustic Speaking Assessment with Speech Encoder and Large Language Model
Research on automatic speaking assessment (ASA) has increasingly adopted multimodal speech large language models to assess learners' speaking performance. However, existing studies provide limited analysis of how acoustic and content information contribute to predictions and how stable the resulting performance is. We propose CASA, a simpler architecture combining Whisper-medium and Qwen3.5-2B that achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing a more interpretable separation between speech delivery and content. On the Speak & Improve Corpus 2025, CASA achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.358, improving on the previous best RMSE while using approximately half the estimated...
| Authors | Nhan Phan, Ilona Lähteenmäki, Anna von Zansen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.