Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in various downstream tasks, inspiring the development of Speech Understanding Language Models (SULMs) to enable comprehensive speech-based interactions. However, most advanced SULMs are developed by the industry, leveraging large-scale datasets and computational resources that are not readily available to the academic community. Moreover, the lack of transparency in training details creates additional barriers to further innovation. In this study, we present OSUM, an Open Speech Understanding Model designed to explore the potential of training SLUMs under constrained academic resources. The OSUM model combines a Whisper encoder with a Qwen2 LLM and supports a wide range of speech tasks, including speech recognition (ASR), speech recognition with timestamps (SRWT), vocal event detection (VED), speech emotion recognition (SER), speaking style recognition (SSR), speaker gender classification (SGC), speaker age prediction (SAP), and speech-to-text chat (STTC). By employing an ASR+X training strategy, OSUM achieves efficient and stable multi-task training by simultaneously optimizing ASR alongside target tasks. Beyond delivering strong performance, OSUM emphasizes transparency by providing openly available data preparation and training methodologies, offering valuable insights and practical guidance for the academic community. By doing so, we aim to accelerate research and innovation in advanced SULM technologies.

Heart Failure (HF) affects millions of Americans and leads to high readmission rates, posing significant healthcare challenges. While Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) such as socioeconomic status and housing stability play critical roles in health outcomes, they are often underrepresented in structured EHRs and hidden in unstructured clinical notes. This study leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to extract SDOHs from clinical text and uses logistic regression to analyze their association with HF readmissions.

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unparalleled effectiveness in various NLP tasks, and integrating LLMs with automatic speech recognition (ASR) is becoming a mainstream paradigm. Building upon this momentum, our research delves into an in-depth examination of this paradigm on a large open-source Chinese dataset. Specifically, our research aims to evaluate the impact of various configurations of speech encoders, LLMs, and projector modules in the context of the speech foundation encoder-LLM ASR paradigm. Furthermore, we introduce a three-stage training approach, expressly developed to enhance the model's ability to align auditory and textual information. The implementation of this approach, alongside the strategic integration of ASR components, enabled us to achieve the SOTA performance on the AISHELL-1, Test_Net, and Test_Meeting test sets. Our analysis presents an empirical foundation for future research in LLM-based ASR systems and offers insights into optimizing performance using Chinese datasets. We will publicly release all scripts used for data preparation, training, inference, and scoring, as well as pre-trained models and training logs to promote reproducible research.