ParaCalib: Semantically Calibrated Paralinguistic Modeling for Depression Detection

Abstract

Vocal behavior provides important signals for speech-based depression detection, but its interpretation often depends on what is being said and how it functions in context. However, existing methods typically treat acoustic cues as context-independent markers, making it difficult to distinguish vocal form from its context-dependent communicative function. We propose ParaCalib, a framework that semantically calibrates paralinguistic behavior by interpreting vocal patterns relative to utterance-level semantic context and inferred communicative function and representing them in a comparable state space. Concretely, ParaCalib uses an Audio-Language Model (ALM) to generate contextualized vocal descriptions and an LLM-based Paralinguistic State Extractor (PSE) to map these descriptions into a structured Semantically Calibrated Paralinguistic (SC-Para) representation. ParaCalib achieves the highest mean Macro-F1 among the evaluated methods, reaching 71.9\% on DAIC-WOZ and 90.5\% on MODMA. Our controlled analysis provides direct evidence of semantic calibration at the PSE stage: under a fixed caption-level acoustic description, varying the accompanying semantic context changes the inferred depression-related paralinguistic evidence. Our exploratory analysis further identifies recurring configurations of paralinguistic states associated with depression labels rather than a single uniformly dominant state.