DEBATE: A Dataset for Disentangling Textual Ambiguity in Mandarin Through Speech

Despite extensive research on textual and visual disambiguation, disambiguation through speech (DTS) remains underexplored. This is largely due to the lack of high-quality datasets that pair spoken sentences with richly ambiguous text. To address this gap, we present DEBATE, a unique public Chinese speech-text dataset designed to study how speech cues and patterns-pronunciation, pause, stress and intonation-can help resolve textual ambiguity and reveal a speaker's true intent. DEBATE contains 1,001 carefully selected ambiguous utterances, each recorded by 10 native speakers, capturing diverse linguistic ambiguities and their disambiguation through speech. We detail the data collection pipeline and provide rigorous quality analysis. Additionally, we benchmark three state-of-the-art large speech and audio-language models, illustrating clear and huge performance gaps between machine and human understanding of spoken intent. DEBATE represents the first effort of its kind and offers a foundation for building similar DTS datasets across languages and cultures. The dataset and associated code are available at: https://github.com/SmileHnu/DEBATE.