RoleHear: Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Role-Attributed Streaming Speech Recognition

Overview & Synopsis

Streaming automatic speech recognition transcribes at low latency but produces an unattributed word stream, while real-time applications such as customer-service analytics need each word tied to a speaker role. Role attribution is usually a separate stage, either an offline or streaming speaker-diarization model aligned to the words or a text-based large language model applied to the transcript, and role labels for training are scarce. We present RoleHear, a semi-supervised pipeline that makes a single cache-aware streaming transducer emit roles inline through lightweight in-vocabulary role tokens: a fast turn-boundary marker followed by a per-role token a few words later. An offline transducer teacher, fine-tuned into a role-attributed recognizer, relabels unlabeled audio, and a multimodal large language model supplies silver role labels where gold annotations are unavailable. The streaming student is fine-tuned on the mixture in a single pass. Across customer-service calls with gold roles and earnings calls with silver roles, RoleHear attributes roles accurately while preserving transcription quality and narrowing the gap to the offline teacher.