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arXiv · 2611.01261

MedAstra: ASR-less Speech Retrieval with Diagnostic Grounding for Medical QA

Elahe Khatibi·Ziyu Wang·Amir M. Rahmani
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Abstract

Spoken medical question answering can fail when automatic speech recognition (ASR) corrupts a clinically important term before retrieval. We present MedAstra, a framework that maps frozen WavLM speech representations through a lightweight adapter into a frozen E5 text embedding space. This enables a dense retrieval path that accepts a waveform without a query transcript. Retrieved passages and speech-linked textual metadata support answer generation with entity alternatives, diagnostic contrasts, relation heuristics, and bounded retrieval refinement. ASR-less refers to the initial speech retrieval interface; lexical retrieval, string-based entity correction, and the text generator require textual inputs. The deterministic speech embedding does not constitute a calibrated model of acoustic uncertainty. Reported retrieval results reach 87.6 Recall@10 for the speech-only retriever and 90.4 for the hybrid configuration, compared with 81.0 for transcript-first dense retrieval. Medical QA and ablations provide descriptive system comparisons, with input-provenance and evaluation limitations stated explicitly. We distinguish controlled synthetic acoustic tests from real clinical speech, qualify component attribution, and specify the remaining comparisons needed to assess speech-only QA and clinical generalization.

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Elahe Khatibi, Ziyu Wang, Amir M. Rahmani. 2026-10-31. MedAstra: ASR-less Speech Retrieval with Diagnostic Grounding for Medical QA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01261

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