arXiv AI

Real-TurnTurk: A Multimodal Turkish Corpus for Turn-Taking Prediction

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

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.

By Freeman Jiang, Ramon Sanabria, Soham Deshmukh, Bandhav Veluri, Simon Michael Vuch Williams, Elliott K. Suen, Garreth Lee, Kevin Yoonho Choi, Takuya Umeki, Riku Kubo, Sathvik Udupa, Chien-yu Huang, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Zhuoyan Tao, Satyapriya Krishna, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Yu Tsao, Hung-yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe
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 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
Sep 12

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

The study investigates which speech aspects best signal the end of a speaker’s turn in conversational AI. By systematically ablating acoustic, prosodic, and semantic cues in a lightweight trimodal classifier, the authors find that combining acoustic and prosodic features yields the highest accuracy and lowest latency, achieving an utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400 ms median latency. Adding textual information actually increases premature detections without improving performance, and feature analysis shows prosodic cues provide the strongest class separability while text representations overlap significantly.

By Rini Sharon, Manickavela A, Kadri Hacioglu, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Predicting Turn-Taking Outcomes in Multi-Party Conversation: Interpretable Modelling of Speech and Gaze Dynamics with Interpersonal Closeness

The study investigates how gaze and speech cues, together with perceived interpersonal closeness, predict turn‑taking outcomes in free four‑person conversations. Using the GaMMA corpus, logistic regression models were trained on interpretable features such as gaze transition motifs, entropy, addressee identity, mutual gaze, and speaker loudness to classify floor‑transfer events as gaps or overlaps. Results show that gaze features alone capture predictive structure, and combining them with loudness yields a robust classifier (ROC AUC = 0.76 ± 0.04) that remains effective even under noisy conditions.

By Mark Dourado, Karim Haddad, Henrik G. Hassager, Stefania Serafin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 8

Multimodal Voice Activity Projection for Turn-Taking in Social Robots with Voice-Activity-Related Pretrained Encoders

Turn-taking prediction is a key requirement for social robots involved in human-human interaction, particularly in mediator settings, where the robot must anticipate conversational dynamics rather than merely react to pauses. This work presents a Multimodal Voice Activity Projection (MM-VAP) framework that extends the original audio-only VAP formulation to synchronized audio-visual inputs while preserving its self-supervised future-projection objective.

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