SEAM: Shortcut-Aware Real-Time Detection of Scripted vs. Spontaneous Speech for Interview Guardrails
Provides a robust, shortcut-aware method for real-time scriptedness detection, critical for interview integrity applications.
SEAM detects scripted vs spontaneous speech in real-time for interview guardrails, achieving 0.971 ROC-AUC on an external evaluation set with an 8s window, while mitigating shortcut learning from corpus and recording artifacts.
Scripted vs spontaneous speech detection is appealing for interview guardrails, but benchmark performance can be inflated by shortcuts tied to corpus identity, channel conditions, and recording artifacts rather than speaking style itself. We present SEAM, a shortcut-aware framework for real-time scriptedness detection that combines uniform preprocessing, seam-aware sampling, non-speech augmentation, and a compact DistilHuBERT backbone. With 8s windows, the model achieves 0.971 +- 0.004 ROC-AUC on an external interview-domain evaluation set. Removing the shortcut-prevention components improves internal held-out metrics but sharply reduces external performance, indicating shortcut learning. Post-training quantization reduces the model footprint to 41.8MB with little loss in external performance. The results demonstrate that robust real-time scriptedness detection depends not only on the backbone, but on shortcut-aware data design and evaluation. We release code and model checkpoints.