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Special Topic: Turn-taking

One of the most basic decisions for dialogue management is when the system should talk, and when it should listen. Most systems strictly regiment this process by a user button-push or long silence to end the turn, and don't listen again until the systme finishes producing a prompt. More sophisticated systems allow the user to "barge-in" and interrupt the system at any point. More recently, researchers have been developing models based on the richness of human conversation, allowing signals that a speaker would like to take or release the turn, and algorithms for managing this process.

Required Readings

  1. David G. Novick, Brian Hansen, Karen Ward Coordinating turn-taking with gaze. ICSLP 1996
  2. Ethan O. Selfridge and Peter A. Heeman A Bidding Approach to Turn-Taking In 1st International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 2009.
  3. Bohus, D., Horvitz, E. Decisions about Turns in Multiparty Conversation: From Perception to Action, in ICMI-2011, Alicante, Spain 2011

Other Readings
  1. Starkey Duncan Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 23(2), Aug 1972, 283-292. Alternate location
  2. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson: A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation Language, 50, 4 (1974) 696-735
  3. David R. Traum and Elizabeth A. Hinkelman, Conversation Acts in Task-Oriented Spoken Dialogue, In Computational Intelligence, 8(3):575--599, 1992.
  4. Edlund, J., Heldner, Mattias, & Gustafson, J. Utterance segmentation and turn-taking in spoken dialogue systems. In Fisseni, B., Schmitz, H-C., Schröder, B., & Wagner, P. (Eds.), Computer Studies in Language and Speech (pp. 576-587). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. 2005
  5. Gudny Ragna Jonsdottir, Kristinn R. Thorisson, and Eric Nivel Learning Smooth, Human-Like Turntaking in Realtime Dialogue IVA 2008
  6. Antoine Raux and Maxine Eskanazi A Finite-State Turn-Taking Model for Spoken Dialog SystemsHuman Language Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 629–637, Boulder, Colorado, June 2009.
  7. KRISTINN R. THÓRISSON NATURAL TURN-TAKING NEEDS NO MANUAL: COMPUTATIONAL THEORY AND MODEL, FROM PERCEPTION TO ACTION Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems, 173-207. Björn Granström, David House & Inger Karlsson (Editors). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2002.
  8. J. P. DE RUITER, HOLGER MITTERER, N. J. ENFIELD PROJECTING THE END OF A SPEAKER’S TURN: A COGNITIVE CORNERSTONE OF CONVERSATION, Language, 82 (2006), pp. 515–535
  9. Mikio Nakano, Yuka Nagano, Kotaro Funakoshi, Toshihiko Ito, Kenji Araki, Yuji Hasegawa, Hiroshi Tsujino Analysis of User Reactions to Turn-Taking Failures in Spoken Dialogue Systems Sigdial 2007.