arXiv AI

The Importance of Speech Genre for End-of-Turn Detector Training

The study investigates how the speech genre of training data affects end‑of‑turn (EoT) detection. By training a streaming ConvLSTM EoT detector on matched corpora—multi‑turn human‑human conversations versus single‑turn human‑machine interactions—the conversational model achieves up to +0.45 higher F1 scores across four test sets, mainly due to fewer false alarms on mid‑turn pauses and hesitations. The advantage persists at both frame‑level and utterance‑level decoding and is evident only when evaluated on conversational data, not on single‑turn speech.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

BanglaTurn: A Benchmark and Whisper-Based Model for End-of-Turn Detection in Bangla Speech

BanglaTurn is a new corpus of 35,374 Bangla podcast speech samples, each 3 to 15 seconds long, labeled for end‑of‑turn detection through speaker diarization, an LLM pass, and human verification. A Whisper‑based model with task‑specific classification heads achieves 84.33 % accuracy on a balanced test set, outperforming the Smart‑Turn v3 baseline (69.28 %) and reducing the false‑negative rate from 51.57 % to 7.55 %, though with a higher false‑positive rate. The study also details the contributions of encoder‑layer fine‑tuning, multi‑scale pooling, INT8 quantization, and reports inference latency of 165–191 ms on CPU.

By Mizbaul Haque Maruf
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
4d ago

TurnTurk-GPT: Text-Based Turn-Taking Prediction for Turkish

TurnTurk‑GPT is a Turkish text‑based turn‑taking predictor created by fine‑tuning a Turkish GPT‑2 model with the TurnGPT objective on both synthetic and real dialogue. The model is evaluated on real Turkish conversations using word‑level decision points on unpunctuated, lower‑cased text, and it outperforms a multilingual end‑of‑turn detector in both recording‑disjoint and speaker‑disjoint settings. While it matches a zero‑shot Turkish language model on unseen speakers, it only surpasses it when test speakers appear in training; removing verb‑final suffixes significantly degrades performance, highlighting the importance of Turkish morphology for turn detection.

By Ahmet Tu\u{g}rul Bayrak, Fatma Nur Korkmaz, Nur Ya\u{g}mur Tuncer, Mustafa Serta\c{c} T\"urkel
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 2

Efficient ASR Training with Conversations that Never Happened

Conversational ASR for lower-resource languages and niche domains is limited by the scarcity of domain-matched multi-speaker training data. We propose an augmentation pipeline that generates scenario-level dialogues with participant metadata, maps speaker attributes to TTS voice profiles, and assembles synthesized utterances into speaker-aware simulated conversations.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 19

ASR-Style Transcript Normalization Removes Useful Pragmatic Signal for Dialogue Act Classification

The study investigates how automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcript normalization—specifically the removal of filled pauses, punctuation, and colloquial expansions—affects dialogue act classification. By testing nine transcript conditions across six classifiers and three conversational corpora, the authors find that heavy normalization consistently lowers Macro‑F1 scores, especially when using a comprehensive filler lexicon. Punctuation removal and selective filler removal also degrade performance, indicating that the impact of normalization varies with preprocessing choices, feature extraction methods, and the conversational context.

By Lucky Onyekwelu-Udoka, Md Shafiqul Islam
arXiv AI
Oct 21

Abstract Compression of Conversational Audio Context for LLM-based ASR

arXiv:2603.26246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard LLM-based speech recognition systems process utterances in isolation, limiting their ability to leverage conversational context. Her...

By Shashi Kumar, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Sergio Burdisso, Kadri Hacioglu, Thibault Ba\~neras-Roux, Hasindri Watawana, Dairazalia Sanchez-Cortes, Srikanth Madikeri, Petr Motlicek, Andreas Stolcke
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Lost in Speech: Trilingual Spoken Hallucination Detection Across Audio and Transcripts

The paper introduces a trilingual spoken hallucination detection benchmark covering English, Russian, and Kazakh news, with 12,013 samples that include synthetic alterations and severity levels, as well as 290 fact‑checked misinformation items. Detectors are evaluated in a reference‑free setting on text, ASR transcripts, and audio, revealing that most models underperform baseline classifiers, except Gemma‑3n on transcripts. Synthetic‑trained detectors achieve high macro‑F1 scores on real‑world misinformation, but Russian provenance analysis highlights model‑dependent signals that confound synthetic benchmarks.

By Meruyert Aristombayeva, Jason S. Lucas, Chaewan Chun, Dongwon Lee