arXiv Computation and Language 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

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

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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.

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