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arXiv · 2602.08979

Beyond Transcripts: A Renewed Perspective on Audio Chaptering

Fabian Retkowski·Maike Züfle·Thai Binh Nguyen·Jan Niehues·Alexander Waibel
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Abstract

Audio chaptering, the task of segmenting long-form audio into coherent sections, is increasingly important for navigating podcasts, lectures, and videos. Despite its relevance, research remains limited and text-based, leaving key questions unresolved about leveraging audio information, handling ASR errors, and transcript-free evaluation. We address these gaps through three contributions: (1) a systematic comparison between text-based models with acoustic features, a novel audio-only architecture (AudioSeg) operating on learned audio representations, and multimodal LLMs; (2) empirical analysis of factors affecting performance, including transcript quality, acoustic features, duration, and speaker composition; and (3) formalized evaluation protocols contrasting transcript-dependent text-space protocols with transcript-invariant time-space protocols. Our experiments on YTSeg reveal that AudioSeg substantially outperforms text-based approaches, pauses provide the largest acoustic gains, and MLLMs remain limited by context length and weak instruction following, yet MLLMs are promising on shorter audio.

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Fabian Retkowski, Maike Züfle, Thai Binh Nguyen, Jan Niehues, Alexander Waibel. 2026-02-09. Beyond Transcripts: A Renewed Perspective on Audio Chaptering. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08979

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