A Prompt-Guided and Quality-Aware Robust Text–Audio Intent Recognition Framework for Elderly Care

Abstract

In natural language understanding, intent recognition plays a central role in human–computer interaction. However, in elderly-care scenarios, acoustic signals are often affected by atypical speech patterns, slower speaking rates, and environmental noise, making audio information less reliable and reducing the effectiveness of conventional text–audio fusion methods. To address this problem, we propose a prompt-guided and quality-aware text–audio intent recognition framework. Specifically, a χ2-based intent prototype soft prompt is introduced to enhance the semantic representation of text. Then, a residual-free text-guided cross-attention module is designed to refine degraded acoustic features using textual semantics as reliable guidance. In addition, a dynamic fusion gate is developed to adjust the contributions of text and audio based on modality reliability and intent-related information. Experiments on the MIntRec dataset with simulated acoustic degradation show that the proposed model achieves 60.90% accuracy, 60.80% weighted F1, and 57.90% macro-F1, outperforming several competitive baselines. These results indicate that the proposed framework can improve the robustness of intent recognition under challenging acoustic conditions in elderly-oriented interaction scenarios.