arXiv Computation and Language

TurnBench: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Turn-Taking Dynamics in Spoken Dialogue

TurnBench is a new multi‑domain benchmark for evaluating turn‑taking dynamics in spoken dialogue. It comprises a 30‑hour hand‑labeled corpus of dyadic human conversations, a standardized evaluation protocol for end‑of‑turn and interruption detection, and covers six distinct interaction styles with triple annotation. The benchmark also provides a 104‑hour training set, a public leaderboard, and an interactive dataset viewer at https://turnbench.sesame.com.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Same Words, Different Actions: Paired Turn-Taking Evaluation under Rewritten Dialogue Contexts

The paper introduces ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for evaluating Chinese real‑time spoken dialogue systems on turn‑taking. ECHO pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either Yield or Keep actions, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. Experiments on four speech systems reveal that three systems over‑yield, correctly keeping the floor on fewer than 13% of backchannels, while the fourth system shows a more balanced performance, illustrating that interruption‑only evaluation can overestimate turn‑taking reliability.

By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Zhou Wang, Dawei Yang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

ECHO: A Matched-Contrast Benchmark for Context-Sensitive Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Dialogue

ECHO is a new paired diagnostic benchmark designed for Chinese full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems to evaluate context‑sensitive turn‑taking. It pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either a Yield or Keep decision, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. The benchmark introduces pair accuracy, penalizing constant‑action policies, and shows that many systems are biased toward Yield, performing better on interruptions than on backchannels.

By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Dawei Yang, Zhou Wang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

M3-DuplexBench: A Multi-Turn, Multilingual, Multidomain Benchmark for Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models

M3-DuplexBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems (FDSDSs) that can listen while speaking. It covers multi‑turn interactions in both English and Japanese across casual conversation and question‑answering domains, jointly assessing interaction timing and response content. The benchmark also offers a reference‑conditioned setting to test sensitivity to dialogue history and trajectory mismatch.

By Ryo Fukuda, Atsushi Ando, Hiroki Kanagawa, Takatomo Kano, Marc Delcroix, Naohiro Tawara, Yuya Chiba
arXiv AI
Sep 25

A Harness for Synthesizing Diverse Naturalistic Full-Duplex Conversations

The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.

By Matthew Sun, Vinay Kothapally, Meng Yu, Chao Huang, Hao Zhang, Yixuan Zhang, Steve Yves
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

DuplexGen: Adaptive Synthesis of Human-AI Turn-Taking Dialogues

arXiv:2607.26178v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Turn-taking is a central component of full-duplex interaction. Which turn-taking behaviors are appropriate varies with the scenario, yet current mo...

By Takyoung Kim, Kang-wook Kim, Sang Hoon Woo, Julia Hirschberg, Gunhee Kim, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges

The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.

By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant

arXiv:2609.13076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational voice agents have advanced significantly, offering increasingly natural human-machine interactions through both cascaded and end-to-en...

By Yi-Jen Shih, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Guan-Ting Lin, Kai-Wei Chang, Siddhant Arora, Shu-wen Yang, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, David Harwath