{"ID":23475892,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-18T01:09:05.407443952Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19398","arxiv_id":"2609.19398","title":"A Cross-Lingual Acoustic Disease-Alignment Framework for Respiratory Health Assessment from Spontaneous Speech","abstract":"Spontaneous speech offers a scalable, noninvasive signal for respiratory health assessment, yet interpretable models that generalize across languages remain challenging because disease-related acoustic changes are confounded by language-specific phonetic variation. We present CL-DAF, a Cross-Lingual Disease-Alignment Framework that identifies acoustic dimensions whose disease effects remain consistent across languages. Using 201 English and 75 newly collected Bangla speakers, we construct a common 272-dimensional acoustic representation and quantify disease alignment using signed rank-biserial effects and the Language Invariance Score. We first show that spontaneous Bangla speech separates COPD from controls (AUC 0.85); however, 133 features reverse their disease direction across languages and the full representation transfers poorly (AUC 0.49 from Bangla to English). CL-DAF isolates 26 disease-aligned features that raise AUCs to 0.825 and 0.722 from English to Bangla and Bangla to English, respectively. These findings provide a foundation for multilingual clinical speech models emphasizing pathology over language-dependent variation.","short_abstract":"Spontaneous speech offers a scalable, noninvasive signal for respiratory health assessment, yet interpretable models that generalize across languages remain challenging because disease-related acoustic changes are confounded by language-specific phonetic variation. We present CL-DAF, a Cross-Lingual Disease-Alignment F...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19398","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.19398v1","authors":"[\"Roksana Khanom\",\"Raghib Asfak Tasnim\",\"Bodrun Nahar Bithi\",\"Shafia Shirin Supty\",\"Saiful Islam Raju\",\"Ashok Agrawala\",\"Nirupam Roy\"]","published":"2026-09-16T20:29:03Z","proceeding":"cs.SD","tasks":"[\"cs.SD\",\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}